How do you get a job in M&A?
- M&A professionals work with clients on deals to buy and sell companies.
- M&A juniors put together pitchbooks in PowerPoint to help banks win a role advising on deals.
- M&A juniors also work on Excel models to help value the companies involved in deals.
- M&A jobs can be paid. A $110k salary in year one is considered typical.
- Bonuses for senior M&A bankers can reach seven figures.
- M&A jobs can involve gruelling hours. 100-hour weeks are not unheard of.
- Even just two years in M&A can leave you well positioned for the future. Opportunities for ex-M&A juniors are available in private equity, hedge funds, corporate finance, and elsewhere.
A job working in Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A) is one of the most sought-after and high-profile roles in investment banking. Senior M&A bankers travel the world and advise on the world’s biggest and most complex deals, reshaping entire industries.
M&A bankers are professional advisors. They operate at the highest levels, working with large global companies (“corporates”, as they’re known in banking), advising chief executives how best to position their organizations for the future.
Unlike management consultants, who help companies determine and implement the best strategy without necessarily changing the company’s component parts, M&A bankers drive strategy through structural change. They encourage the companies they’re working with (known as clients) to join together with other companies as equals (a merger), to buy and control a smaller company or part of a company (an acquisition), or to sell part of their own operations (a disposal).
Mergers, acquisitions, and disposals happen for different strategic reasons. For example, a client may decide to merge with a rival operating in the same business area to increase its market share. This is known as a horizontal merger.
Alternatively, a client may decide to acquire one of the companies that supplies the components necessary to fabricate its product. This is a vertical merger. There are also conglomerate mergers, when a company merges with or acquires a firm operating in a totally different market. And there are congeneric mergers, which take place when companies are in the same industry but offer different products. Conglomerate mergers have the advantage of allowing clients to enter completely different markets. Congeneric mergers bring advantages like established distribution channels, or whole new product lines.
Globally, the top three banks in M&A are Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and JPMorgan, as shown in the table below. These are the banks that work on the biggest and the most complex deals, often involving buyers and sellers in different countries. But there are a number of other big U.S. and European banks that are also active in M&A, and many also lend the money to finance the deals.
While the biggest, multi-billion-dollar deals like Paramount's $111bn acquisition of Warner Bros grab the headlines, the majority of deals are below $500m in size, and there are a number of so-called mid-market M&A firms which earn good money advising on these deals. There is also a large number of so-called boutique investment banks, which are often independent, privately-owned firms run by a small number of senior M&A bankers who’ve left big banks to set up on their own.
Boutiques are typically pure advisory houses – unlike banks, they don’t provide the financing for deals themselves. Some of the largest boutiques are publicly listed. The best-known boutiques include Evercore, Lazard, Rothschild, Moelis, Centerview Partners, PJT Partners, and Perella Weinberg Partners.
The top M&A bankers are known as “rainmakers” for their ability to land big deals, but beneath the glamour the hours are long. Junior bankers have to spend years learning their trade before they can generate their own deals.
What does an M&A analyst actually do?
M&A analysts are the lowest rung in the banking hierarchy.
Working as an analyst in an M&A division means being flexible, because you are often working on multiple projects at any point in time. You will be working on both live deals and pitching new ones. When you’re working on a live deal, you’ll be involved in deal execution or helping a client buy or sell an asset, respectively called buy-side or sell-side mandates. When you’re pitching, you’ll be preparing documents, PowerPoint presentations specifically, for senior bankers to use as they persuade clients to do new deals.
Typically, an M&A analyst will also be responsible for the financial analysis that underpins an M&A deal. This includes building a financial model, running the valuation and financial impact analysis, and preparing materials to present this analysis to the client. Sometimes they will also be the point of contact for any questions or requests from the client relating to the analysis, but analysts are rarely placed in front of clients.
“Day-to-day life as an M&A analyst largely depends on the deals you are working on,” says the head of UK M&A at one European bank. “Broadly speaking, mornings and early afternoons involve client interaction, status and/or diligence calls and discussions to agree on the workstreams the deal team should focus on as well as next steps. By the afternoon or evening, meetings are less frequent, and you can focus on progressing on the deliverables, which can range from excel models to the preparation of marketing materials [pitchbooks].”
What are hours like in an M&A job?
They are tough. When deals boomed after the COVID pandemic, some junior bankers at Goldman Sachs complained that they were working more than 100 hours a week and that they were on the verge of collapse. M&A analysts at other banks voiced similar complaints and the banking industry responded by increasing junior bankers’ salaries and making sure juniors get some time off at weekends.
In 2026, however, long hours are still common. 75 hours a week are not unusual at big banks – especially American ones – and boutiques can regularly reach 85-hour work weeks on average.
Our Compensation & Lifestyle Reports, which compiled average working hours for M&A professionals, found that the average M&A banker worked 67.1 hours a week on average in 2023, 67.9 hours a week in 2024, and 67.3 hours a week on average in 2025.
The death of Jefferies associate Carter McIntosh in May last year was suspected at the time of being due to "pulling crazy hours", but a later investigation showed it was a fatal combination of cocaine and fentanyl. The long work hours mean that drugs are rife in investment banking - Adderall is a popular choice of stimulant.
Junior M&A bankers work so hard because M&A is a fast-paced job, and juniors will often work on multiple deals. Deal execution tends to be unpredictable by nature: it’s a live situation and a client-driven activity.
The work of pitching clients who might participate in M&A deals tends to be more predictable, but senior bankers will often ask juniors to make changes to the PowerPoint presentations advertising the deal late at night – the famous “pls fix” email. But the hours aren't always extreme; “working full weekends and very late nights may occasionally happen around a particular deal, but these hours are not the norm,” says the M&A head.
There are upsides. One Morgan Stanley banker tells us that “M&A analysts have the opportunity to manage their own time, and as long as the work gets delivered to a high standard, you have the freedom to fit the job around your personal commitments.”
What is your career path in M&A?
One of the benefits of a career in M&A is that there is regular and steady progression, and a clear promotion path. You start as an analyst, become an associate after a few years, a vice president (VP) a few years after that, a director a few years after that, and then a managing director (MD) if you qualify. The exact titles can vary between different banks.
“Meritocracy is key to this path,” says Joe Hannon, head of UK mergers & acquisitions for UBS. The time it takes to reach the top rung varies, but as a (very rough) rule of thumb, it’s around 10 years – if you get there at all, as the skillsets needed for a junior and senior banker are very different.
That’s if you decide to stay in banking – but M&A jobs offer a wide variety of exit options. Many graduates stay at banks for their two-year M&A analyst training program, and then leave for jobs in private equity, management consulting, and corporate development teams in large companies, among others.
M&A analysts are in very high demand. They are frequently poached by rival firms and rival industries, such as private equity: a talent war that reached a crescendo in the summer of 2024, in which private equity firms were recruiting bank juniors before they even started their jobs, led JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon to call the practice “unethical”. They put a pause on it for around six months, and according to recruiter Anthony Keizner of Odyssey Search Partners in Business Insider, are actually more satisfied with their slightly-more-experienced banking analysts.
Banks, however, are going to some length to prevent their juniors from leaving for private equity. JPMorgan, for example, told its analysts last year that they are immediately obliged to disclose if they have accepted a job offer elsewhere. In return for honesty, the bank will fire anyone who accepts an offer elsewhere. Goldman Sachs, also recently, now requires analysts to swear an oath every three months that they haven’t accepted a job elsewhere.
Which skills do you need for a career in M&A?
Read More: The skills you need for a career in M&A
A career in M&A is a very easy sell, but surviving and thriving in it is a different question. M&A careers are very demanding, and while the office hours improve with seniority, the job fuses more and more with your existence as you climb the ranks.
What you’ll need to bring, at the beginning at least, is stamina, strong technical/quantitative skills, and lateral thinking. Long (often 100+) working hours are common for analysts, mistakes are not tolerated, and above all, imagination is a sign of being a top-tier future senior advisor prospect.
The latter becomes more important over the years. If a client comes to you with a question, “you cannot show up and give a cookie-cutter response,” said Avinash Patel, partner at boutique investment bank PJT Partners. “Every specific situation dictates a different piece of advice, and that takes time, effort, and thinking. It’s a constant Rubik's Cube – you got a new one every few minutes to solve."
At the very top of the pyramid, your job takes up more and more of who you are. A senior Goldman Sachs banker, for example, gave an anecdote that he calls colleagues in Europe and Asia while going for a run in Central Park.
How is AI changing M&A?
Read More: How AI is changing careers in M&A
Junior M&A work has always meant building pitchbooks and models. Pitchbooks are the PowerPoint presentations that banks use to win deals, and the models are the vast Excel spreadsheets that banks use to calculate company valuations.
Making both of these is something that AI does very well. Banks are well aware of this, and Anthropic and OpenAI are both building products aimed at automating this kind of work, with OpenAI hiring scores of bankers to help train its models.
The consequences are visible in hiring, and will likely continue. McKinsey's AI consulting chief expects junior analyst classes to shrink by as much as two thirds. Lazard has said it wants fewer juniors working for each dealmaker – possibly less than half of the current ratio. But banks function on apprenticeships, and the tasks being automated are the ones that teach people the job. Deutsche Bank's answer is to put analysts in front of simulated clients.
No one, unfortunately, seems to think that this will reduce working hours much.
Education and qualifications for M&A
Read More: The qualifications you need to work in banking, trading, and more
The fierce competition for M&A roles means that you need to maximise your chances of getting an internship. A look at recent recruits in Goldman Sachs' M&A team suggests the most popular degree subjects for junior M&A bankers are economics, finance and business management. At JPMorgan, they include much the same thing. Some of the off-piste degree subjects include philosophy and foreign languages.
You may also want to study for the exams run by CFA Institute. Historically, the three CFA exams, which lead to a CFA Charter, were used by people working in research jobs and the asset management industry. In the past few decades, the CFA has also become much more popular in areas like M&A, with junior bankers and students studying for the CFA Level I qualification to differentiate their CVs, successfully or not.
The other key qualification for achieving an M&A job has historically been a top MBA. MBA qualifications are usually open to people with a few years' experience at work. Historically, junior bankers would spend two years as an analyst before leaving to complete an MBA and then returning to work as an associate, but this process has changed: MBAs are no longer mandatory. Even so, MBAs can still be a way to enter an M&A job mid-career or to swap into a top tier bank.
Salaries and bonuses in M&A
Read More: 22-year-old investment bankers got the biggest bonuses increases for last year
M&A jobs pay a lot. According to our 2026 Compensation & Lifestyle Report, salaries for investment bankers can range from $60k to $660k, depending on seniority, and bonuses can be anywhere between $50k and $510k, again depending on seniority. “Investment banking” includes both debt and equity capital markets professionals, as well as M&A.
M&A bonuses depend on fees paid to the bank when the company it is advising completes an M&A transaction. Fees vary depending on the size and complexity of the deal, but a good rule of thumb is that fees equate to between 0.5% and 2% of the value of the transaction. Generally, the bigger a transaction is, the smaller the percentage taken by bankers is. When the proportion of the fee allocated to bonuses is shared among the team that worked on the deal, the MD who originated or won the deal earns the most.
Bonuses at most banks are paid predominantly in shares, with a smaller cash element. Bonuses can be 80% of your salary as an analyst – and many multiples of your salary as an MD.
Pay is typically highest in the most prestigious M&A boutiques like Evercore, PJT Partners, and Perella Weinberg Partners, followed by major US banks such as Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley. Pay is generally lowest at mid-market firms.
Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: +44 7537 182250 (SMS, WhatsApp or voicemail). Telegram: @SarahButcher. Signal: sarahbutcher.22 Click here to fill in our anonymous form, or email editortips@efinancialcareers.com.
Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: comments are moderated intermittently by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. You must take sole responsibility for comments you post on this site. We will take reasonable steps to weed out anything that we consider to be offensive or inappropriate.
