New York law makes firms post salary ranges on job listings. For an industry that treats compensation like a state secret, that one rule is the biggest leak in quant finance.

Stack the intern disclosures on top of H1B filings and self-reported threads and you get the clearest read in years on what these firms pay. The figures below are compiled from public filings and disclosures, much of it assembled by the Quant Enthusiasts newsletter. Treat them as floors, not ceilings: the most senior people hold green cards or O-1A visas or came up internally, and none of them appear in this data at all.

Role	Firm	Disclosed	Source
PhD quant research intern	Optiver	$80–90K	NY intern posting
AI research intern	XTX Markets	$35K / mo base	NY intern posting
Quant researcher base, US avg	—	~$190K	H1B filings
Quant researcher base, top of set	Five Rings, Jane Street	highest disclosed	H1B filings
Quant researcher base	Balyasny	$250K	stated in hiring

Compiled from H1B salary filings (270+ quant-researcher data points in 2025) and New York intern salary disclosures, via Quant Enthusiasts.

Geography bends the picture. A quant-researcher base runs around $190K nationally, a touch higher near $198K in New York, and Miami, the smaller market, leads them all near $242K. The state tax line is doing a lot of that work.

What they are buying is shifting too. Balyasny's head of quant research, Giuseppe Paleologo, said on a student podcast that being an excellent coder is no longer much of a competitive edge. Everyone at the top codes fine. What is scarce is judgment about which method fits which problem. Read that as the funds and the AI labs now bidding for the same trait, which is exactly why intern pay, the entry toll, has become the most contested number on the board.

The disclosed figures are the price of admission, not the prize. The real money is carry and PM economics, and it is invisible in every public dataset by design. What the leak actually shows you is the floor each firm will defend to win a twenty-one-year-old, and that floor is rising fastest exactly where the AI labs started bidding for the same people. If you want to know where the talent war is hottest, do not read the senior comp. Read the intern postings.