Some compliance professionals are earning $475k+
Compliance roles in financial services are not famous for being well-paid. They’re certainly among the more respected middle- and back-office functions, but they’re not well known for their pay. Maybe they should be.
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Recruitment consultancy Barclay Simpson’s 2026 salary survey for compliance professionals in London found that salaries – not including bonuses – for financial services professionals ranged anywhere between £40k ($55k) to over £350k ($477k), depending on seniority and sector.
Predictably, pay for investment banking compliance professionals was best, with buy-side compliance professionals working in hedge funds and private equity not too far behind. Pay for compliance professionals in asset management was worst of the lot, especially for more senior roles.
Junior compliance salaries were not great, all things considered. Barclay Simpson noted that said salaries saw a slight decline due to sluggishness in the jobs market, which was amplified by weaker bonuses than last year. The plateau in growth was driven by a surplus of compliance candidates availability due to restructuring and redundancies.
“Compliance professionals with the right skills and experience can nevertheless still achieve attractive salary uplifts in the current climate, with employers increasingly favouring those who have good business acumen in addition to key technical capabilities,” Barclay Simpson said. The typical sort of skillset that makes for the best compliance professionals.
As we've noted before, pay in compliance has been rough in recent years. "I am shocked at how salaries across compliance have dramatically dropped," one former executive director told us in February. "Roles that used to pay six figures, now pay £90k, for double the responsibility."
The workload trend is one that started back in 2024, and pay was an issue then, too. Barclay Simpson noted that the median base salary increase for compliance professionals in London was 1-4% in both 2026 and 2025.
Pay elsewhere is not as good, but still nothing to sniff at. A 2026 Morgan McKinley salary survey in Singapore found that the highest salaries, of SG$320k (US$252k) was for regulatory compliance experts.
Pay can be higher in New York. Goldman Sachs, for example, has a current job listing for a financial crime compliance vice president (VP) in the city. It has a listed salary range of $100k to $250k. At the upper end, that's on par with what the firm pays its investment banking VPs. A Morgan Stanley listing for an executive director (one rung above VP, generally) in its financial crime advisory group lists a salary range of $165k to $275k, too.
Our 2026 Compensation & Lifestyle Report offered some invite for the bonuses that compliance professionals earn. Our report found that they earned just 21% of their compensation as a bonus, below their peers in both risk and technology. Only their colleagues working in operations were worse off, percentage wise.
One place that compliance professionals are doing well is their work-life balance. They worked just 43 hours a week on average, less than almost all of their colleagues, and were one of the few groups of people who reported working less hours in 2025 than in 2024.
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