Big Bank CEO pay surged by $45 million in 2025

The bosses across Wall Street’s six biggest banks all saw their pay jump after a banner 2025.

CEOs for JPMorgan Chase (JPM), Bank of America (BAC), Citigroup (C), Wells Fargo (WFC), Morgan Stanley (MS), and Goldman Sachs (GS) all earned $40 million or more in total compensation last year.

Collectively, their pay increase for 2025 rose by $45.3 million from the year before to $258 million, according to regulatory filings and Yahoo Finance’s tally. That combined increase was their second-highest ever, after 2021, with the majority of their pay coming in the form of stock-linked incentives as opposed to cash.

This year, Morgan Stanley CEO Ted Pick saw the biggest bump among rivals, followed by Wells Fargo CEO Charles Scharf.

Total annual compensation for 57-year-old Pick, who became Morgan Stanley’s CEO in January 2024 and is the youngest among these big bank chiefs, jumped 32% to $45 million. The increase put Pick only behind Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon for the highest annual pay.

2025 was a pivotal year for Wells Fargo’s Scharf and his bank. Regulators finally loosened an onerous restrictions on the banking giant that had capped its ability to grow since before Scharf took over in October 2019. Scharf’s annual compensation rose 28% to $40 million. The total compensation figure was the lowest among rivals.

Big bank stocks surged last year, thanks in large part to rising revenues from their Wall Street divisions and hopes that the Trump administration’s push to loosen financial services regulation will make it easier for them to grow lending. Last year, their stocks outperformed major stock market averages, rising between 24% to 64%, led by Citigroup.

Pay for Citigroup’s Jane Fraser rose 22% to $42 million. For Goldman’s Solomon, total compensation rose 21% to $47 million. Bank of America’s Brian Moynihan and JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon got increases of 17% to $41 million and 10% to $43 million, respectively.

Bankers are still optimistic for a big 2026 in dealmaking, lending, and trading. They are also navigating how AI will change their businesses just as investor fears over pressure from artificial intelligence have swept shares of financial companies, including wealth managers and other intermediary businesses, into a risk-off rout.

“At the end of the day, the activity around is strong. So we feel good about the investment banking [business],” Bank of America’s Moynihan said at his bank’s financial services conference last week.

Worldwide investment banking revenue is currently running at a healthy pace. With nearly half of the quarter to go, the level has climbed to 70% of last year’s full first quarter, according to Dealogic data.

“The likely outcome in 2026 is we’re going to have a pretty constructive year for capital markets, a pretty constructive year for M&A,” Goldman Sachs’ Solomon said at a UBS conference the same day. But Solomon also warned of the possibility of an unforeseen “speed bump or recalibration or slowdown” in the deals market, similar to last April following the unveiling of the Trump administration’s sweeping tariff agenda.

So far in 2026, big bank stocks are all down, with the exception of Goldman Sachs. Despite the rout, some of these same CEOs haven’t been disheartened yet.

“We do not see AI tools as an existential threat” for big US lenders, Morgan Stanley large-cap equity analyst Betsy Graseck wrote in a recent note pushing back on the worry.

“We expect regulators to continue to require banks to operate with Humans in the Loop, even when deploying AI tools,” Graseck added.

David Hollerith covers the financial sector, ranging from the country’s biggest banks to regional lenders, private equity firms, and the cryptocurrency space.

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