Financial Analyst

Also known as: Finance Analyst, Investment Analyst

Business & EntrepreneurshipBachelor's DegreeStrong Growth

Evaluate investments, analyze market trends, and guide organizations on where to put their money.

Salary Range

Entry Level

$62K

Starting salary

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Top Level

$1M

Top salary

Managing Director (Investment Bank)

The highest-paid specialization or seniority level for financial analysts.

About 1 in 333 reaches this level

About 377,200 financial and investment analysts in the US (BLS Employment Projections, SOC 13-2051, 2025). Investment-bank Managing Directors earning $1M+ all-in (base + bonus + deferred) number roughly 1,000-1,500 across major banks (~0.3%).

Salary data based on 2025 BLS, Glassdoor, and industry reports. Actual compensation varies by location, experience, and employer.

How to Become One

This career typically requires a bachelor's degree. Here are the top colleges for it:

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Cost to Qualify

Bachelor's degree (4 years)

4 years after school

$56,454

Tuition and required fees. Living costs are not included

Four years of tuition and required fees runs about $56K at a typical public college in our list (in-state) and about $288K at a typical private one. Both are pricier than the US national averages (about $48K public in-state, $180K private nonprofit, College Board 2025-26) because our 161-college dataset only includes nationally-ranked schools, not every US college. This excludes room and board, which we show separately on each college's page.

↗College Board, Trends in College Pricing and Student Aid 2025 (PDF) - 2025-26 average published tuition and fees: public four-year in-state $11,950, private nonprofit four-year $45,000 (the national averages our note quotes as about $48K and $180K over four years)

Sticker price, not what most people pay — scholarships, aid and in-state status all move it. Room and board is shown separately on each college's page.

AI Risk Assessment

High Risk (Level 4/5)How we score ›

The everyday work of a junior financial analyst is building and updating spreadsheet models, summarizing earnings calls and company filings, cleaning data, and putting together slides and recurring reports. That is structured work with words and numbers, the kind AI handles well. Anthropic's March 2026 study of how its Claude AI is actually used at work names financial analysts among the most exposed jobs it measured.

The largest US banks have said on the record that they plan to use AI to hold down headcount. In January 2026, Bank of America's CEO said "the No. 1 thing" is to "work the headcount through operational excellence and applications of new technologies, including AI"; Wells Fargo's CEO, in December 2025, called AI's long-term effect on its headcount "extremely significant"; and Citi said it had made headway on its plan to cut 20,000 jobs by the end of 2026. The six largest US banks ended 2025 with 1.09 million employees, their lowest total since 2021. In June 2026 Bloomberg reported that banks are cutting junior analyst classes by as much as two-thirds, according to a senior partner at McKinsey's AI consulting arm. Anthropic's study also found early, tentative evidence that fewer 22 to 25 year olds are being hired into the most AI-exposed jobs, which is the rubric's entry-level factor showing up.

What keeps this at 4 rather than 5 is that the profession as a whole is not shrinking. BLS projects financial analyst jobs to grow 7% from 2025 to 2035, much faster than the average for all jobs, with about 29,500 openings a year, as investing goes global and businesses need people to make sense of growing amounts of data. Anthropic found no rise in unemployment among workers in the most exposed jobs. And some announced cuts may be ordinary cost-cutting with an AI label: JPMorgan's CEO said in May 2026 that some companies "may use AI to cover up the fact that they should never have hired those people in the first place."

For a student, the realistic picture is a narrower front door: fewer juniors hired, each expected to do more with AI, and more value in judgment work like defending assumptions and explaining results to clients and managers. Unlike accounting, there is no license that only a human can sign.

What would change this score. The banks' plans are still being carried out. If cut targets like Citi's are met, junior analyst classes stay small, and BLS's growth does not show up, it goes to 5. If junior hiring recovers and the cuts turn out to be mostly ordinary cost-trimming, it drops to 3.