How much do fintech startup jobs really pay?

Fintech startups and scale-ups are intense places to work these days, but people are still flocking to them in order to make millions. It's not as straightforward as your average corporate job, however; the real benefits of fintech pay come via stock in your company, which can take years to liquidate (if it ever does).

What salary do you earn in a fintech startup?

Using data from AI sourcing platform Wellfound, we've compiled salary data for three of the fintech's biggest hubs: London, New York and San Francisco. We've also added global remote salary data, although it's becoming increasingly out-of-fashion for startups to permit remote work. As you might expect, San Francisco offers the most competitive salaries (up to $240k at the top end), but New York offers salaries above $220k for top employees too.

Interestingly, both London and San Francisco fintechs pay their staff well above the average for the broader startup ecosystem in their respective cities. New York, meanwhile, pays fintech staff a mere 5% premium, despite the fact that the city receives more early-stage startup funding according to cap table management platform Carta.

How much stock do you earn working in a fintech startup?

Generally, the earlier you join a fintech, the more stock you earn. Carta data suggests that the median first hire at a startup receives 1.5% of the company's stock on average, but this share falls to just 0.3% by the median sixth employee. In the event your fintech becomes a unicorn, that can mean a difference of millions of dollars.

When joining a scale-up or a slightly older startup, stock pay tends to look more like a bonus that takes a very long time to vest. This stock comes in many forms but the most popular are:

• Restricted Stock Units (RSUs): This is company stock which is given to you for free but vests over a period of multiple years. Once vested, the shares cannot actually be sold until a liquidity event. If you leave the company before your RSUs are fully vested, you walk away from that stock.
• Incentive Stock Options (ISO): This is stock that vests on a schedule like RSUs, but you have to pay cash to own it. The price per share is the fair market value of your startup at grant date, which means you can get stock at well below market value in the future if the startup grows. If you walk away from the startup, you usually have 90 days to exercise these options before they expire.

The amount of stock you're offered in either case tends to ramp up as you become more senior. Using Stripe as an example, Levels.fyi data suggests that, for an entry-level engineer, stock pay makes up 21% of total compensation on average. For staff engineers, that rises to 56%.

The unfortunate reality of fintech stock pay

Be warned that not every fintech is a success story. Quite the opposite, in fact. Market intelligence platform Tracxn revealed in a report this month that there have been over 18,000 fintech startups founded in the UK to date. Of those, just 30 are unicorns, only 157 made it to IPO, and just 825 achieved liquidity by getting acquired. Almost 6,000 fintechs in the UK have been deadpooled (in which case, you get nothing).

Admittedly, many fintechs have moved away from the model of building up to an IPO or acquisition. Stripe and Revolut, for example, have achieved tremendous growth and remained private while offering multiple employee liquidity events for staff to cash out their stock units and break the 'golden handcuffs'.  The problem with these is that they're infrequent, can take a long time to organize, and are ultimately done at the behest of the company itself.

Return to our guide on jobs in fintech.

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