Quant trader vs quant researcher vs quant developer pay: same base, different bonus
Ask which quant track pays best and you will get three confident, contradictory answers. In a 2021 Blind thread asking exactly that, a Citadel Securities-tagged user answered "QR > Trader > SWE", an Optiver-tagged user answered "Trader > QR = SWE", and a Two Sigma-tagged user said researchers out-earn engineers there, "but it's not dramatic". They can all be right, because the headline number most people compare (base salary) barely differs between the three roles at many top firms. The difference lives in the bonus, and the bonus behaves very differently depending on how close you sit to the P&L.
Last reviewed 2026-10-04. Every figure below is labeled: official (a firm's own job ad or filing), reported (press), or self-reported (Levels.fyi, Blind, forums), with the year and location. Pay moves every cycle, so use this as a sourced map of where pay sits.
Year one: posted base salaries are often identical
US pay-transparency rules mean many trading firms now print a base salary on their job ads. Here is what live ads said on 2026-10-04. These are base salaries only, before sign-on and bonus.
| Firm (US location) | Trader | Researcher | Developer / SWE |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jane Street (New York, new grad) | $300,000 | $300,000 | $300,000 |
| Hudson River Trading (US, 2027 grads) | $300,000 (Algorithm Developer, research and trading) | same role | $300,000 |
| Five Rings (New York, 2027 campus) | $300,000 | not listed | $300,000 |
| IMC (Chicago, graduate) | no live US grad ad | $250,000 | $200,000 |
| Akuna Capital (Chicago, junior) | from $145,000 | from $145,000 | from $145,000 |
| Tower Research (NY and Chicago, 2027) | $150,000 to $250,000 (combined trader/researcher ad) | same role | not listed |
(All official: firm job ads, accessed 2026-10-04.)
Three patterns stand out:
- Identical bases are common. Jane Street, HRT and Five Rings print the same number for traders and engineers. Akuna's junior trader, junior researcher, junior quant developer and entry-level software engineer ads all state the same Illinois Equal Pay Act minimum.
- The exceptions favor research. IMC's graduate quantitative researcher ad lists $250,000 against $200,000 for its graduate software engineer, a rare case of a posted gap on day one.
- Base barely grows. Jane Street's experienced-hire trader, researcher and software engineer ads print the same $300,000 as its new-grad ads. HRT's experienced Algo Developer and C++ Software Engineer ads both list $200,000 to $300,000, and its mid-frequency quantitative researcher ad lists $175,000 to $300,000. At IMC in Chicago, a Senior Equity Options Volatility Trader ad lists $175,000 to $250,000 and a Senior Trader ad lists $300,914, so senior trader bases there run from about $175,000 to about $301,000: close to the $250,000 graduate researcher figure. (Official, 2026.)
That last point is the key to the whole comparison. If a senior trader's base can sit at, or only modestly above, a graduate researcher's, the reward for seniority has to come from somewhere other than base. Every one of these ads says some version of the same thing: base is "only one part" or "only one component" of total compensation, which also includes a discretionary bonus.
Where the gap actually opens: the bonus
Recruiters have said this for years. In a 2023 eFinancialCareers piece comparing the two roles, recruiter Ben Goodfellow put it plainly: "Like-for-like hires in terms of experience levels are comparable on base, but you'd typically find that researchers who have tangible impact on PnL will earn higher in total comp." The same article found that H1B salary filings showed quant developers earning higher base salaries than researchers at three hedge funds in 2022, by just under $10,000 at Millennium to nearly $40,000 at Balyasny, which Goodfellow attributed to firms hiring most researchers at junior levels. (Reported, eFinancialCareers, March 2023.)
The bonus is also the part that can shrink. In 2022, recruiter Peter Wagner told eFinancialCareers: "There's a reason your base salary is $200k when you earn, say, $600k total per year", warning young quant developers who were demanding $1m that the bonus portion was the transient part: "Compensation structures allow firms to adjust salaries down when the market warrants it." (Reported, eFinancialCareers, October 2022.)
Outside the US the shape is similar. A 2025 salary report from recruiter Danos Group, as reported by eFinancialCareers, found that on the UK buy side, developer salaries were "largely the same" as quant researcher salaries, with researchers earning "slightly higher average bonuses" at AVP and ED level. The same report put managing director-level quant developers at up to £1m in total compensation, with salaries of up to £400k. (Reported, eFinancialCareers citing Danos Group, September 2025, UK.)
So the gap between the three tracks is mostly a bonus gap, and the bonus gap depends on one question: how directly is your work tied to money the firm made?
- Traders and researchers who own a strategy, a book or a signal can point to its P&L. Their bonus tends to track it, which means a wider spread in both directions.
- Developers typically build infrastructure many desks share, so their bonus is harder to attribute to a single P&L line. That usually means a steadier bonus and a flatter curve.
How the spread widens with seniority
Seniority data for these roles is thin and mostly self-reported, so read the following as rough direction.
Years 0 to 2. Bases are similar or identical (see the table), so whatever gap exists at this stage comes from sign-on and bonus, which firms do not publish. HRT's graduate ads, for example, say a sign-on and a discretionary performance bonus come on top of base. (Official, 2026.) For hedge funds, Balyasny's head of quant research Giuseppe Paleologo was cited by eFinancialCareers as putting quant developer total compensation at $250,000 to $400,000 on joining. (Reported, eFinancialCareers, September 2025, hedge funds, location unspecified.)
Years 3 to 7. This is where P&L attribution starts to split people. In a 2022 Blind thread on Citadel pay progression, a user with no verified employer put senior quants at "700-800" (thousand) and managing directors at "1000-1500", figures other commenters in the thread disputed. A user tagged as working at a financial services company wrote that once pay is closely tied to P&L the variation "gets really large. So 600k-10M". A Citadel Securities-tagged user added that there "is no guaranteed bump for seniority" and that pay "naturally tends to plateau" once performance flattens. (Self-reported, Blind, November 2022, US; unverified individual claims.)
Senior engineers. Hard data here is scarce. In a 2019 Blind thread about Two Sigma, a Bloomberg-tagged user (not a Two Sigma employee) wrote that a developer can make "up to 0.5 million per annum if you do well" and said they had heard $1m to $2m was average for researchers. Both are outside, unverified claims from a single commenter. (Self-reported, Blind, April 2019, US.) The UK Danos figure above is firmer: it shows the engineering track reaching about seven figures at the top of the MD band (up to £1m in total compensation).
A note on the data. The most-cited self-reported database is noisy for these roles. Levels.fyi's US "Quantitative Researcher" page showed a median total compensation of $218,000, with $150,000 at the 25th percentile, $320,000 at the 75th and $518,000 at the 90th, because the title spans banks, tech companies and trading firms alike. Its Jane Street page showed software engineer figures of $363,000, $343,000, $483,000 and $378,000 across four levels, out of order, which is what small samples look like. None of the company pages reviewed (Jane Street, HRT, Optiver, Citadel) displayed a trader figure at all. (Self-reported, Levels.fyi, accessed 2026-10-04.) In this data, trader pay is the least visible of the three, which is one reason forum claims about it vary so widely.
The real ceilings: pay pools, partnerships and pods
Above a certain level, role title matters less than the economic structure you sit inside.
The firm's pay pool moves. Jane Street paid out $9.38 billion in compensation in 2025, more than double 2024, an average of about $2.68 million across its staff, according to Bloomberg as reported by Yahoo Finance and GuruFocus. (Reported, May 2026.) That average overstates a typical salary: it is a firm-wide figure that includes the highest earners. The useful lesson is the year-on-year swing. When the pool can double, bonuses across every track move with it, and the P&L-linked ones move most.
Partnership changes the ceiling. XTX Markets' UK accounts, as reported by eFinancialCareers, showed its main technology entity paying 127 staff an average of £457,000 in 2025. (Reported, eFinancialCareers, April 2026, UK.) Its separate partnership, XTX Research LLP, shared £1.73bn of 2025 profit among an average of 24 members, £895m of it to the highest-paid member. (Official, Companies House accounts filed August 2026, UK.) The jump from employee to owner dwarfs any trader versus developer gap.
Titles blur at the top. Some firms do not split the roles the conventional way. eFinancialCareers reported that Quadrature, which paid staff $3.19m per head in 2023, employs no quant researchers and hires programmers into its quant development team. (Reported, eFinancialCareers, September 2025.) HRT's graduate research and trading hires carry the title Algorithm Developer. (Official, 2026.) At firms like these, "developer" can carry research economics.
Multi-manager pods pay a share of P&L. At pod-based hedge funds, a portfolio manager's team is typically paid a formula share of the P&L it generates. Mergers and Inquisitions describes total team compensation as "between 10% and 20% of their P&L", which the PM then divides among the team. (Third-party, Mergers and Inquisitions; formulas are negotiated and not published by funds.) This is the path that produces the eight-figure outliers people quote, and it is open mainly to researchers and traders who can show an attributable track record.
Putting it together
A summary of the sources above (analysis; individual firms vary):
| Quant developer | Quant researcher | Quant trader | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Posted entry base (US, 2026) | Often equal to the others | Often equal, sometimes higher | Often equal |
| Bonus driver | Firm and team results | Signal or strategy P&L, often | Book or desk P&L |
| Year-to-year variance | Lower | Higher | Higher |
| Typical route past seven figures | MD-level roles or ownership | PM, partnership | PM, partnership |
The honest summary: developers tend to have the higher floor, researchers and traders the higher ceiling, and at many top trading firms all three start on the same base. Self-reported rankings disagree because firms differ in how much P&L each role can claim.
If you are deciding between offers, ask the questions the job ad does not answer. Is the first-year bonus guaranteed? Is the bonus tied to a desk's P&L, a strategy's, or the firm pool? Is any of it deferred? How do people move between tracks? The answers tell you more about your five-year pay than the base does.
If you are still choosing a track, the interview bars differ too. Our quant developer interview prep page covers the engineering-heavy route, the Jane Street and Hudson River Trading firm guides show how two of the firms above run their processes, and the OA simulator lets you sit a timed assessment for each track.
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