Goldman’s working hours are actually tame compared to other banks

Junior bankers tend to disagree about which firms work their young the hardest, and whether the fabled “magic roundabout” exists or is another masochistic City fantasy.

Now someone has tried to settle the argument. Banking website Wall Street Oasis pulled together the average working hours for each bank using information from thousands of analysts and associates.

It shows the small and boutique banks working their staff the hardest, with over 80 hours a week expected at Moelis, Lazard and Rothschild. Juniors at Moelis work just under 90 hours a week, or nearly eighteen hours a day if their work is spread out over the conventional five day working week (unlikely).

The figure isn’t far off double the 48 hour working week – the UK legal limit that many suits in the Square Mile opt out of.

The continental banks – like Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank – tend to go a little easier on their workers, with Barclays coming in at a kind 71 hours a week. They might give out some of the biggest pay packets, but Goldman Sachs are relatively tame in comparison, with a 72 hour working week on average. Rivals UBS and Morgan Stanley allegedly demand fewer than 70 hours a week from their junior gungslingers. How charitable.

While the smaller banks enforce hours which would even make a junior doctor squirm, it’s got easier at the bigger US investment firms thanks to measures brought in last year to reduce hours.

To make it worse, junior bankers are somehow also supposed to find time to revise for their exams. Earlier this year 20 analysts from Goldman were sacked for Googling the answers and a dozen JP Morgan junior accountants were shown the door for using “illicit material”.