Five banks revealed their 2025 bonuses. They weren’t very big
It will be a while until the 2025 bonus season gets into full swing next month. But while we wait for American, European, and Japanese banks to publish their bonus figures, some early alarms have already buzzed.
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At the start of December, the big five Canadian banks (RBC, BMO, TD, CIBC, and Scotiabank) published their financial results for the last quarter of 2025. Those results included details about the banks’ respective bonus pools, to be distributed soon – and the results were pretty good, actually. All figures below are in USD based on today’s exchange rate (US$1 = CA$0.74).
The highest average bonuses (and compensation packages) were to be found at Royal Bank of Canada (RBC). The bank reported an average bonus per person of $75k and average compensation of $147k for 2025, up from $68k and $136k in 2024 respectively.
RBC’s bonus pool went up by around $800m in total, which - as we reported last week - was an increase of around 13%. That’s a similar increase to last year, when the bonus pool went up by 16%. There was some grumblings after those numbers were announced, however, with one senior banker at RBC telling us that European bankers were overlook compared to North American peers.
The lowest average bonuses and compensation packages for 2025 are to be found at Scotiabank: $22k and $73k, on average, respectively. Scotia did notch one important win, however – of the Big Five Canadians, it had the largest bonus increase (as a percentage). Scotiabank’s average bonus went from $18k per person for 2024 to $22k for 2025, an increase of more than 22%.
That’s not a surprise at all. Scotiabank operates a much smaller investment banking presence than most of its peers – for example, in LSEG’s Q3 2025 investment banking leaderboard, it had the second-lowest investment banking revenue of the big five Canadian banks in the Americas – less than half of RBC’s.
Aside from Scotiabank, Canadian banks tended to pay quite similarly to each other in both 2024 and 2025, with average compensation roughly between $110k and $150k. Their pay is comparable to that at other North American banks – JPMorgan Chase, for example, which also has a substantial retail banking arm, paid an average of $162k across 2024 (the last year for which full figures are available).
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