Bankers worked less hours than ever in 2025. Only the 22 year-olds liked that
Finance is an industry known for having tough working hours. Those working hours lead to stress, and they lead to poor health. But what if the opposite was true? What if financiers… Like their hours? Are they crazy, or just institutionalised?
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We’ve collected a lot of data over the years in our annual Compensation reports. We used to have an annual Lifestyle Report too, but we’ve since merged them. We’ve pulled data from both iterations – across more than 10,000 individual contributions – to find out how working hours and health has changed in finance over the last few years.
What’s striking is that, since 2022 and across all age groups, financial services professionals are working less hours than ever. While 2024 was a pretty busy year for them, 2025 was extremely relaxed – despite trading and investment banking revenue (and workload, one would presume) increasing across the board.
The most drastic change was for professionals between the age of 20 and 25, who are all essentially all analysts. On average, their working hours decreased by over 18%, going from approximately 49 per week to approximately 40 per week. Working hours decreased for all ages, by around 8% on average.
Despite that, there was a mixed impact on health from those decreased working hours. We aggregated a “health” score based on self-perceived mental and physical health (which we’ve polled since 2023 only). This was more or less flat on average between 2024 and 2025: it was up slightly including under 25-year-olds, and down slightly without them.
20-25 years old were the only group of people who reported a double digit (11.4%) increase in their self-perceived health between 2024 and 2025. They also reported a significant increase in their health between 2023 and 2024.
The most significant decreases in health between 2024 and 2025 was for people in their late 20’s. That was a surprise, as this group reported the same downward change in working hours that others reported, broadly.
Perhaps the change in perceived health was related to changing priorities. A young French asset manager was feeling “more pressure and stress,” due to increased responsibility. He said that his physical health was getting worse, consequentially. He wished his employer would offer him “more earnings to compensate stress,” as well as for his manager to “take more responsibility.”
The increased responsibility can be embraced or ignored. “I do more sport,” said a young European consultant in our survey, “and I care less about corporate world.” He noted that his physical heath had improved between 2024 and 2025. “I give less f*cks.”
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