Doing the Math on the 100-Hour Week

Two weeks ago, in the post about how I found this career, I wrote a sentence that has been quietly bothering me since: "The hours are notorious, and that does not scare me off the way it probably should, because relentless is already the word I would use for myself."

I wrote that without ever checking what the hours actually are, or what they actually pay. My Current page has been asking the question for weeks: are the 100-hour weeks investment banking is known for actually worth it for the pay? I finally sat down and did the math, and parts of the answer surprised me.

What the hours actually are

The 100-hour week is real, but it is not the average week. From everything I can find, a normal stretch runs 60 to 80 hours, live deals push past 100, and the honest full-year median lands somewhere around 80 to 85. The leaner elite boutiques reportedly run closer to 80 to 90 as the baseline. Most banks now have some version of a protected Saturday policy, and most accounts agree it holds right up until a live deal decides it does not.

Call it 80 hours to be fair. That is two full-time jobs, stacked.

The 13 analysts

The most famous piece of evidence in this debate is a survey that 13 first-year Goldman Sachs analysts put together in 2021, formatted, in what might be the most investment banking move of all time, as a pitch deck. They reported averaging close to 100 hours a week over a six-week stretch, sleeping five hours a night, and watching their self-rated mental and physical health fall by more than six points on a ten-point scale since starting the job. Their big ask was a cap at 80 hours.

Here is where I have to apply my own rules. That survey is 13 people. My gold post-mortem was 13 trades, and I spent a whole post explaining why you cannot treat 13 data points as a law of nature. Same discipline applies here: 13 self-selected analysts during one of the busiest deal booms in history is a strong signal about the worst stretches, not a census of the job. I believe the signal. I am just not going to pretend it is more than it is.

The math

First-year analysts at the big banks currently earn roughly $170,000 to $190,000 all-in. That is a headline number that turns heads at any age, and it is the number everyone quotes when they call banking the best paying job out of school.

Then you divide.

At 80 hours a week for 50 weeks, $180,000 comes out to about $45 an hour. In the 100-hour stretches it falls closer to $36. A first-year consultant at McKinsey, BCG, or Bain earns less on paper, around $130,000 to $170,000, but works closer to 60 hours, which lands at roughly $50 an hour. A new-grad software engineer at a big tech company makes somewhere between $140,000 and $200,000 working about 43 hours a week. That is $65 to $95 an hour.

Per hour, the famous paycheck is not a premium at all. Banking pays less than tech and about the same as consulting. There is no overtime. The extra money is not the job paying you more. It is the job taking more of you.

What the paycheck is actually for

So if the wage argument is dead, why does anyone rational take the job? Because year one is not the product. More than 90 percent of private equity analyst hires come straight out of banking analyst programs, and that recruiting can start as early as six months into the job. The two years are a credential and a training program: modeling, deal process, and pressure tolerance, compressed at a density nothing else out of undergrad matches. The pay for year one is not $180,000. It is the door that years three through five walk through.

Which means the question I put on my Current page was the wrong question. "Worth it for the pay" has a clear answer, and the answer is no. The real question is whether it is worth it for the destination, and that one only has a personal answer.

Where that leaves me

Nothing in this research changed what I want. But it changed what I am allowed to claim. I wrote that the hours do not scare me because I am relentless, and I stand by wanting to find out. What I cannot do anymore is pretend the trade is money for effort, because the math says that trade is bad and anyone taking it for the wage alone is getting played. The only honest reasons left are wanting the work itself and wanting what it unlocks, and those happen to be my reasons.

I am sixteen and the hardest week I have worked would not impress a single analyst. So I will not claim the hours cannot break me. I will claim that I now know exactly what I would be signing up for, priced per hour, with the discount stated plainly. That sentence from two weeks ago survives, but barely, and only after an audit. Around here, that counts as passing.