What H-1B Filings Actually Reveal About PE, VC, and Banking Salaries

Every employer that sponsors an H-1B visa has to file a Labor Condition Application stating the exact base salary it's offering for that specific position, at that specific location, on that specific date. Those filings are public. They don't cover every employee, and they skew toward certain roles and certain visa-eligible hires, but for the roles they do cover, they're one of the very few salary data sources that isn't self-reported, isn't an estimate, and isn't run through a platform with its own incentive to inflate the numbers people see.

Why H-1B data, and why this is different

Most of what you read about compensation at private equity and venture capital firms comes from one of two sources: a self-reported salary aggregator like Glassdoor, where anyone can submit a number with no verification, or a firm profile written by someone who has never worked in the industry and is citing that same aggregator. Neither is wrong exactly, but neither is a primary source either.

H-1B disclosure data is a primary source. Every year, thousands of finance firms sponsor visas for analysts, associates, engineers, and specialists, and the Department of Labor requires them to state the actual offered wage on the record. I sourced the tables below from that public disclosure data.

I've had Goldman Sachs on my LinkedIn for years, and during every recruiting season I get five to ten DMs a day from students and career switchers asking about comp and process. I can only tell so many people what I personally know. Publishing the actual filings, with my own network confirming they're accurate, does that at scale.

Method, and the caveats that matter

Three things to understand before reading any of the tables below, because they change how you should interpret the numbers.

First, H-1B filings skew toward roles that commonly sponsor visas, which in finance means a heavy tilt toward technology, quantitative, and data roles alongside the front-office ones. That's not a flaw in the data, it's genuinely useful information: it shows you what a firm like Wells Fargo or Jefferies pays its software engineers and quant analysts, which almost nobody publishes elsewhere, and it's a legitimate data point if you're not gunning for the front-office seat specifically. But it means a search for "KKR" or "Blackstone" pulls back plenty of technology, legal, and operations postings alongside the investment roles, and you have to read the job title carefully rather than averaging everything together.

Second, a title like "Post-MBA Associate" or "Analyst" at a PE or growth equity firm sometimes covers investing roles and sometimes covers portfolio operations, fund accounting, or a specific functional team. I've flagged where that matters below.

Third, every filing has a date on it, and comp moves. A number from 2020 needs an inflation adjustment or a mental note that most firms have run at least one comp reset since then, more on that in the section on reading old data below.

PE mega-funds: KKR, Blackstone, General Atlantic

These are the largest, most recognizable names in private equity, and the H-1B data here is unusually dense because each firm sponsors dozens of visas a year across investing, operations, and technology.

KKR & Co.

Two things stand out. The Associate range widens meaningfully from 2020 ($103K) to 2025 ($185K), and that's not just seniority mix, it's the same title moving up across years. And the standalone "Analyst, Private Equity" entry at $72,363 sits well below the general Analyst band, which is a reminder that a bare title match on a filing can hide a genuinely different comp tier for the same nominal role, likely a specific fund or regional program with its own scale.

Blackstone

Blackstone's filings are heavily weighted toward its credit arm (still called GSO in a lot of the older filings), BAAM (its hedge-fund solutions business), and real estate, alongside straight private equity. That breadth is itself informative: Blackstone is a genuinely diversified alternative asset manager, not just a buyout shop, and the comp bands are fairly consistent across those divisions at the analyst and associate level.

General Atlantic

General Atlantic is the clearest growth equity comp read in this dataset, and it lines up with what people I know who've interviewed there describe: a base structure that's meaningfully richer than a typical private equity analyst seat at the junior level, with "Financial Analyst" as the entry title rather than a straight "Analyst."

Growth equity & VC: a16z, Sequoia, Francisco Partners

Andreessen Horowitz (AH Capital Management)

I've spoken with people who work at a16z, and this comp is legitimate for what the firm pays. The $190,000 investing analyst base is real, not an outlier in the filing, and it tells you something about how a16z is staffed differently from a traditional PE shop, more platform and fund-strategy roles sitting alongside pure investing seats, each paid competitively.

Sequoia Capital

I know people who've worked at Sequoia a few years back, and the comp checks out completely. A $290,000 Associate base in 2025 sounds high next to a typical PE associate, but Sequoia's own economics support it, and it's worth knowing if you're comparing a Sequoia seat against a mega-fund PE offer, the base alone can already be ahead before you get to carry.

Francisco Partners

Francisco Partners is a good example of why reading the title matters. The Associate range spans $101,587 to $180,000 across the same nominal title, and the gap is mostly explained by the "Post-MBA Associate" entries clustering at the top ($180,000) while pre-MBA associate hires and fund-accounting-adjacent associate titles sit much lower. The fund accountant and senior fund accountant rows are genuinely useful if you're not trying to break into the investing seat specifically but want to work at a firm like this, that's a real, disclosed back-office comp band most people never see.

Bulge bracket: Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo

Goldman Sachs & Co.

These are almost all first-year and mid-level filings out of Goldman's San Francisco office, and they line up with what I know from friends still at the firm. The $110,000 analyst base matches current first-year IB pay, and it's worth noting the spread even within a single level: an analyst on the Financing Group desk and one on Sales Support are both first-years, but they're paid meaningfully differently, and that's true across every bank, not just Goldman.

Wells Fargo Bank, N.A.

Wells Fargo's H-1B footprint is heavily technology and quantitative, which makes sense given how large its engineering organization is relative to front-office headcount. I worked at Wells Fargo Securities before Goldman and would genuinely call it a great place to work, so it's worth flagging that the front-office banking and commercial-banking relationship-manager rows above are the closer comps if you're specifically evaluating a coverage or corporate banking seat, rather than averaging against the much larger volume of engineering postings in the full dataset.

Advisory boutiques: Evercore, Jefferies, Qatalyst, Robert W. Baird

Evercore Partners

Jefferies

The Jefferies analyst band moving from $82,000 in early 2021 filings to $125,000 by 2024–2025 is one of the clearest, most granular illustrations in this entire dataset of the post-COVID base-salary reset across Wall Street, the same pattern I lived through personally, covered below.

Qatalyst Partners

I've spoken with people at Qatalyst, and this comp is legitimate. It's one of the highest-paying tech M&A boutiques on a per-head basis, and the associate base sitting at $175,000-$200,000 while most bulge-bracket associates run $150,000-$175,000 tracks with what I've heard directly from people there.

Robert W. Baird & Co.

Baird is a genuine, real middle-market bank, not a boutique with a fancy title on a tiny headcount, and its analyst-to-associate comp progression here is a useful real-world reference for anyone deciding between a true middle-market shop and one of the smaller boutiques covered in my boutique investment banking breakdown.

Valuation & advisory: Duff & Phelps

This dataset skews older, mostly 2019-2021, so the numbers read low next to current market rates, and that's a genuine data-quality note rather than a reflection of what Duff & Phelps (now part of Kroll) pays today. Even discounted for age, though, it's one of the only public windows into real-world valuation-advisory comp by seniority level, which barely exists elsewhere in finance career content.

IR & PR agencies: ICR, Brunswick, LifeSci, Russo

If you're not chasing a PE or banking seat and are instead looking at investor relations advisory or financial communications, which is exactly the path I took into finance, this is data almost nobody publishes.

I went from biotech investor relations at Solebury Trout to Wells Fargo Securities to Goldman in three years, the full path is in the truth about biotech investor relations. Seeing the ICR SVP-level number clear $160,000 for energy IR is a useful confirmation that senior IR advisory comp is genuinely competitive, not a consolation-prize track relative to banking, which is exactly the case that piece makes at length.

Reading old data: inflation, and the COVID base bump

A filing from 2019 or 2020 is not directly comparable to one from 2024 or 2025, and the Jefferies analyst progression above ($82,000 in 2021 to $125,000 by 2024) is the cleanest illustration of why in this whole dataset. That jump isn't really inflation, it's a structural, one-time reset.

I was working in investment banking through 2019 and 2020, and I watched this happen in real time. There was a real bump during COVID, top-tier banks like Goldman moved first-year analyst base from around $85,000 to $110,000, while a lot of other banks held closer to $100,000 for a while before catching up. If you're looking at an older H-1B filing anywhere in this piece, the honest read is: assume a similar step-change has likely happened since, on top of ordinary annual increases, not a smooth year-over-year inflation curve.

The practical rule: treat any filing older than roughly two years as a floor, not a current estimate, and weight the most recent filing for a given title and firm far more heavily than an older one, even from the same firm.

Takeaways if you are actually deciding between offers

Read the title, not just the firm name. The single biggest source of confusion in H-1B data is treating every "Associate" or "Analyst" row at a firm as the same job. A post-MBA associate, a pre-MBA associate, and a fund-accounting associate can sit $60,000-$80,000 apart on the same firm's own filings.

Weight recent filings heavily and discount old ones. A 2020 number tells you what a firm paid in 2020, not what it pays now, and the gap can be a full base-salary step, not a rounding error.

Don't ignore the roles outside your target seat. If you're evaluating whether to work at a firm like Francisco Partners or Duff & Phelps in a non-investing capacity, the fund accounting, valuation-services, and portfolio-operations rows in this data are real, disclosed comp bands you will not find published elsewhere.

Cross-check against people who actually work there when you can. Every firm in this piece, I either worked at, worked closely with, or have friends and former colleagues currently inside. That's the entire reason this data is worth publishing rather than just linking to a government database: the numbers matched what real people at these firms told me, which is the closest thing to verification public salary data can get.