Financial analyst salary in 2026: the spread and the industries

BLS puts the median pay for a financial analyst at $103,570 a year - $49.79 an hour - as of May 2025, in the Occupational Outlook Handbook entry for the occupation. The more useful number is the one either side of it: the same page reports $63,720 at the 10th percentile and $180,860 at the 90th. That spread of $117,140 is what you are actually negotiating inside, and this post is about where in it a given posting sits.

What does a financial analyst make in 2026?

Financial analysts, May 2025

$103,570Median annual pay

$63,720–$180,86010th to 90th percentile

443,100Jobs in 2025

The most recent federal wage estimate for this occupation is May 2025. It reports a median of $103,570, which means half of the 443,100 people BLS counts in the job earned more than that and half earned less. The median is not the average. Averages in finance get pulled upward by a small number of very large salaries, which is why BLS leads with the midpoint and prints the percentiles beside it.

How to read this: if a posting for a Financial Analyst tops out near $103,000, it is priced at the national middle. That is neither a bargain nor an insult - it tells you the employer benchmarked against a broad national figure rather than against the securities industry, and that is usually a fact about the company, not about you.

What this number is not: it is a wage estimate for a single month across every employer BLS surveys. It does not separate base salary from bonus, it is not what any individual firm pays, and it carries no adjustment for where you live.

Which industries pay financial analysts the most?

Median annual wage for financial analysts by industry, May 2025

The five industries BLS breaks out on the Financial Analysts handbook page.

Securities, commodity contracts, and other financial investments		$124,370
Management of companies and enterprises		$101,760
Professional, scientific, and technical services		$101,540
Credit intermediation and related activities		$100,120
Insurance carriers and related activities		$95,830

Securities and investments pays the most of the five, at $124,370. Insurance carriers pays the least, at $95,830. The three industries in between - holding companies, consulting and professional services, and banking - sit within $1,640 of each other, which for practical purposes means they are the same number.

The concrete version: an Equity Research Analyst at a broker-dealer is counted in that top line. A Financial Analyst doing forecasting inside an insurance company, with a similar workload and the same job title on the posting, sits in the bottom one. Same title, $28,540 apart at the median.

One caution about reading this chart as a shopping list. These are medians for the analysts each industry employs, not offers each industry makes for the same work - securities firms concentrate the senior, investment-side roles that pay at the top of the occupation, so part of that $124,370 is a different mix of jobs rather than a premium on identical ones. The handbook does not break the industry figures down by seniority, so there is no way to separate the two effects from this page.

The spread inside an industry beats the gap between them

Here is a claim worth arguing with: for most people reading this, choosing the right industry is the smaller of the two decisions.

Do the arithmetic on the two ranges. The distance from the best-paying industry median to the worst-paying one is $28,540. The distance from the 10th percentile of the occupation to the 90th is $117,140 - 4.1 times as far. Moving from insurance to securities is a real raise. Moving up inside the occupation's own distribution, wherever you do it, is a much larger one, and it is the move that seniority, specialisation and firm size actually buy.

This cuts against the standard advice, which treats industry as the lever and everything else as noise. It is not that industry does not matter - $28,540 is a year of rent. It is that the entire industry gap fits into the occupation's own range four times over, so an analyst who never leaves insurance and climbs toward $180,860 ends up further ahead than one who moves to securities and stays near the $63,720 floor.

The handbook page prints only three points on that distribution - the 10th percentile, the median and the 90th - so there is no way to tell from it how steeply pay rises in between, or how many people sit near either end.

What the percentiles do not tell you is why someone is at the 90th. BLS publishes the distribution, not its causes. Experience, city, firm size, whether the role carries a bonus, and whether the person is really doing portfolio management under an analyst title are all folded into that one column, and the handbook page separates none of them.

Is there a salary figure for my city?

Not one you can quote from a BLS occupation page. The Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics page for SOC 13-2051 now resolves to the OEWS tables index - a directory of downloadable datasets by year and geography, with no wage figures printed on it. That means the familiar "financial analyst salary in Charlotte" table has no federal page behind it any more, and anyone showing you one is either working from a downloaded dataset or from a salary aggregator's own survey.

What the title "Financial Analyst" actually covers

O*NET files this work under 13-2051.00, and the occupation's official name there is Financial and Investment Analysts - a wider box than most job seekers picture. The reported job titles on that page are the giveaway, because they span two quite different careers.

O*NET's sample of reported titles for the code includes Financial Analyst, Investment Analyst, Equity Research Analyst, Securities Analyst, Portfolio Manager, Real Estate Analyst, Credit Products Officer, Planning Analyst and Trust Officer. A corporate planning analyst building a budget model and a portfolio manager running money are both in that list, and both are in the $180,860 figure at the top of the range. If you are the first of those, the 90th percentile is not a promotion path so much as a different job.

The task statements point the same way. O*NET's one-line definition of the code is conducting quantitative analyses of information involving investment programmes or financial data of public or private institutions, and the 26 task statements underneath it lean the same direction: recommending investments and investment timing, interpreting data on price, yield, stability and future investment-risk trends, evaluating and comparing the relative quality of securities in an industry, determining the prices at which securities should be offered to the public. Note what is not on that list - nothing about annual budgets, headcount plans or monthly variance reporting, which is what a large share of people employed as Financial Analysts actually do. Corporate FP&A analysts share the code without sharing the day.

The tools list is more even-handed, and it is the practical part of the page for anyone applying. Microsoft Excel, SQL, Tableau, Microsoft Power BI, SAS, IBM SPSS Statistics, MATLAB, Oracle Database and Microsoft SQL Server all appear under technology skills for the occupation. O*NET flags a subset of those as in-demand - Excel, Tableau, Power BI and SQL among them - and leaves SAS, SPSS, MATLAB and the two database products unflagged. That ordering is a fair guide to what to put at the top of a resume for this code: the spreadsheet, the query language and one of the two dashboard tools, before the statistical packages.

What do you need to get hired as a financial analyst?

The two federal sources give different answers, and the difference is the most useful thing on either page for a career changer.

The Occupational Outlook Handbook's entry-requirements box for financial analysts lists a bachelor's degree as the typical entry-level education, no work experience in a related occupation, and no on-the-job training. Read literally, that describes an occupation you can walk into from a degree. O*NET files the same code as Job Zone Four, "Considerable Preparation Needed", and says most of these occupations require a four-year bachelor's degree, that a considerable amount of work-related skill, knowledge or experience is needed, and that employees usually need several years of work-related experience, on-the-job training, or vocational training.

Both statements come from federal pages about SOC 13-2051. They are describing different things: the handbook's box is the minimum credential an employer advertises, and O*NET's job zone is what people already doing the work tend to have. A Planning Analyst posting that asks for a finance degree and three to five years is not contradicting the handbook - it is the gap between those two pages, showing up in a job description.

The practical reading for someone moving in from accounting, audit or data work: the degree requirement is a real gate and the experience requirement usually is not, provided the experience you have is quantitative and you can name the tools. That is why the technology list matters more than it looks. Excel and SQL are on O*NET's technology skills for this occupation, and they are the two a hiring manager can check in twenty minutes.

What the jobs either side of it pay

All four rows are May 2025 wage estimates and 2025–35 projections from the Occupational Outlook Handbook, so they are comparable with each other. Two things stand out. Financial managers is the step up in both pay and growth, and the handbook says explicitly that people typically enter it with five years or more of experience in another business or financial occupation - naming financial analyst as one of them. And personal financial advisors has a median only $1,500 above financial analysts but a 90th percentile of $357,020, nearly double: a book of clients pays very differently from a salary, and the median hides that completely.

Budget analyst is worth knowing about for a different reason. It pays $11,930 less at the median, but its 10th percentile is only $1,470 below the analyst floor. It is a narrower job with a narrower range, which is exactly what you would want to know before applying to one.

How fast is the occupation growing, and on which projection?

The handbook projects employment of financial analysts to grow 7 percent from 2025 to 2035 - much faster than the average for all occupations - with about 29,500 openings projected each year over the decade. Its wording on where those openings come from is worth reading closely: many of them are expected to result from the need to replace workers who transfer to different occupations or leave the labour force, such as to retire. The same page puts the projected employment change for the decade at 32,000. Set that against roughly 295,000 openings over ten years and the shape of the number is clear - this is mostly a replacement market with a growing edge, not a hiring boom.

O*NET reports a different growth figure for the same SOC code, and the difference is a trap:

Two federal pages, one occupation code

The same job, reported on two vintages. Never compare a figure from one column with a figure from the other.

	BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook	O*NET OnLine 13-2051.00
Occupation name	Financial Analysts	Financial and Investment Analysts
Median annual wage	$103,570	$102,740
Median hourly wage	$49.79	$49.40
Employment	443,100 (2025)	368,500 (2024)
Projection vintage	2025–35	2024–34
Projected growth	7 percent	Faster than average (5% to 6%)
Projected openings	About 29,500 per year	25,100 over the decade

Neither page is wrong. The employment counts are not even from the same year - the handbook's 443,100 is a 2025 count and O*NET's 368,500 is a 2024 one - and the growth figures come from different projection rounds. Neither page explains the gap on its own. The practical rule is to pick one column and stay in it. If a recruiter or a salary article quotes 5 percent growth and you quote 7, you are both reading a real federal source and talking past each other.

If you are applying for this role

Search more than one title. Postings for this work go out as Financial Analyst, Investment Analyst, Planning Analyst, Equity Research Analyst and Securities Analyst, all inside O*NET's 13-2051.00. Searching only the first term hides a large share of the openings, and the ones you are missing skew toward the better-paying end.

Expect a range, and know where it sits. A posting between $63,720 and $180,860 is inside the federal distribution for the occupation as of May 2025. Below the floor, ask what the role actually is. Near the top, expect the interview to be about investment analysis rather than reporting, because that is where the top of this code lives.

Ask one question in the first call: which industry code the role sits in, and whether the number in the posting is base only. The securities-versus-insurance gap is $28,540 at the median, and BLS's figure does not tell you how much of a given offer is bonus - those two facts together decide whether a $110,000 posting is above or below the market for the work.

If you are applying to twenty of these and retyping the same employment history into twenty forms, the platform fills the application from your resume so the time goes into the shortlist instead.