A third of quants are giving themselves an extra workday. Voluntarily
Are you a quant? Or are you trying to be one? Beware the long hours. Not in the office necessarily: our 2026 Compensation & Lifestyle Report found that quants only work around 48 hours per week, less than some middle-office professionals. Beware the hours you’ll need to spend at home.
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The CQF Institute – which awards the Certificate in Quantitative Finance (CQF) – found that more than 30% of industry quants spend at least 21 hours a month upskilling. With four weeks per month, that comes to around 5 hours per week. Another 21% of quants work at least 11 hours a month on upskilling, meaning that more than half of quants spend at least 2 or 3 hours a week improving their skills.
Even if a quant is not spending swathes of their free time to upskill, they know that they probably should. CQF Institute found that 84% of quants believe continuous reskilling is “mandatory”, and 41% of quants reskill completely through self-study. Many of them also do this work outside of work hours, too.
What are they learning? Well, a little bit of everything. 75% of quants surveyed by CQF thought that the skills they need were not taught at university, with the most lacking skills by far being advanced machine learning and agentic AI “systems”, followed at some distance by production-level model deployment.
It’s natural that quants are so focused on understanding and upskilling in AI. 74% of them, according to CQF, expect their role to be transformed “completely” or in a major way by the technology. Just 1% of quants expect minor changes in their role. Curiously however, around 29% of quants say they use AI only once a month or less.
Things might change in the near future. AI’s acceleration has caught up now, more or less, with the bleeding edge of mathematics. One quant, a former Tower Research trader, told us last month that GPT-6 Astra was particularly fantastic. Other finance experts – from Jump Trading, IMC, and Balyasny – said the same about the recently-released Claude Mythos/Fable 5.2.
Frontier AI models being so good at quantitative work might be a worry for quants. When we speak to a quant working for hedge fund Citadel earlier this year, much of his time was occupied with developing and exploring signals in the market – essentially, super fine-tuned pattern recognition to gauge movement in the pattern. That’s the sort of thing that AI is intrinsically good at.
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