Average WEEKLY wage of $9440 for finance in NYC?

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pinetboltz

after reading a bloomberg article earlier today on stanford business school, i was redirected to a BLS.gov website on weekly wages, and was surprised to see that the average weekly wage is $9,440 for the "financial activities supersector" in Manhattan (as of first quarter 2018)

https://www.bls.gov/regions/new-yor...ease/countyemploymentandwages_newyorkcity.htm

upload_2019-2-2_19-26-56.png


That's pretty incredible, translates to $9440 x 52 = $490,880 annual wage on average.

But given that the common observation is that investment banks are bottom heavy, with only a few % who make MD/partner, the $490k average seems quite high

any insights on this? if that's literally the average, got to bring it up with my boss on the next salary discussion, lol
 
nooby_mcnoob said:
Yeah you need median
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yeah, i mean that's my thought too, right skewed distributions/ outliers, but if BLS govt statisticians are reporting "average" there must be a reason they chose that right?

& i just did a rough numbers check,

nyc population - 9 million
nyc working population - 4 million
financial industry workers - approx. 200,000

if the average annual wage is $500k for nyc finance, then total annual wage payout would be 200,000 x $500k = $100 billion

which seems reasonable given that
goldman paid out $11 billion in salary/benefits in 2017 per their financials, on around 36000 headcount, for avg $305k, but then that is global workforce, so i imagine the nyc avg for them is prob higher, given that mix of headcount tilts toward front office more in nyc, as opposed to smaller cities

still, the $500k per year average seems rather high, given that:
- not everyone in nyc finance works at goldman
- even at gs most jobs probably don't pay $500k (or do they)

so what gives?

assuming of course, that there is no excel coding error by some intern who churned out the $9440 avg weekly number
 
Last edited:
Interesting bit is that you can impute the average bonus from these numbers. First, you assume that the regular weekly wage is 3k-ish, so the balance is due to the single bonus check. There are 13 weeks in a quarter, so ($9440 * 13 - $2750 * 13) = 86 grand would be an estimated median bonus for the investment bank. Sounds about right, from my experience.
 
sle said:
Interesting bit is that you can impute the average bonus from these numbers. First, you assume that the regular weekly wage is 3k-ish, so the balance is due to the single bonus check. There are 13 weeks in a quarter, so ($9440 * 13 - $2750 * 13) = 86 grand would be an estimated median bonus for the investment bank. Sounds about right, from my experience.
More...

good point, i had originally annualized the whole thing, now realize that it should only be multiplied for the 1st quarter since that's when bonuses are paid out
 
The
sle said:
Interesting bit is that you can impute the average bonus from these numbers. First, you assume that the regular weekly wage is 3k-ish, so the balance is due to the single bonus check. There are 13 weeks in a quarter, so ($9440 * 13 - $2750 * 13) = 86 grand would be an estimated median bonus for the investment bank. Sounds about right, from my experience.
More...

I doubt the average weekly wage is 3k-ish. I think that category includes bank tellers and back office people.

The average compensation at Goldman is like 400k. It’s about as pure of an ibank around.
 
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