Which coding languages pay the most for banking technology jobs
Working in technology at an investment bank can earn you a lot of money, but pay is not distributed evenly. Depending on what coding language you specialise in, you could find yourself earning a lot more money than your peers.
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We've looked technology job listings for top US investment banks in New York, where salary disclosures are mandated by law. After analyzing over 500 datapoints for four of the most popular languages in finance, we found that C++ engineers tend to earn the most, but Python has the most variation in pay.
C++ outperformed the other languages on average for both the upper and lower bounds of salary ranges. High-level C++ engineers can expect to earn $233k on average, and can earn up to $325k if you're truly exceptional. High-level Python professionals earn just over $210k on average. The highest available salary we found, however, was a JPMorgan managing director (MD) working as a treasury quant in its consumer and community bank. This gave a salary range of $300k to $500k and was the only MD listing we found. The next highest salary we found in Python was still higher than the other languages: $350k.
Python also had the lowest average salary at the lower bound. There are multiple reasons for this; there are significantly more listings available for Python than C++ and JavaScript, and the jobs tended to skew towards junior professionals. There are many more roles outside of pure engineering that use Python for data analysis; the lowest Python salary we found was for a junior structurer at Citi, but other banks had various data analysis and risk roles that brought down Python's average.
Salary, of course, is only one aspect of compensation. Banks pay hefty bonuses (on occasion) to technologists; our 2026 salary and bonus report found that, last year, the average bonus for banking technologists was 37% of salary. For quants, who are more likely to use Python, bonuses were 66%.
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