Let's be honest - is anyone actually working >80 hours a week?

Yes

The market has been so slow the past ~2 years, so consider yourself lucky. The majority of my first year analysts have not been on a live M&A deal, and barely any of the second year analysts have either. Most have never had to draft a CIM before. They definitely have not seen any IPO processes, and very few lead-left equity deals or financing deals, as well. This is at a BB coverage group in NYC. There are a few analysts in my group who tend to get crushed and are often requested by VPs (and above) for “important staffings”/RFPs since they are viewed as competent/reliable, who I think definitely put in 80hrs/week usually — but the majority of analysts don’t see anywhere near that number unless 1) they are exaggerating 2) they are just slow at their job

Dude, it’s not humanly possible to work 80 hours a week the way people are describing it. No human being is a fucking robot. It’s exaggerated. They’re just counting in Subway and being on calls and never mentally checking out from work. You would die from working 80 hours a week consistently with three hours of sleep a day.

I've had some weeks where there were of 80+ hours of working and it's quite tough. Surely everyone experiences long weeks like this, especially when first starting out, but usually its around deal closing periods or an urgent pitch and its not super frequent.

The vast majority of weeks were not that busy. Definitely closer to 40-50 hours of actual work, but after a lot of hours of sitting around, talking, eating, taking walks, watching a show if WFH, you could say you were

The toughest weeks would be like Mon: 9am-5pm no work, so you're scrolling through the news or looking through materials. Then you get 8 hours of work for the next day after sitting idle so then you have a lot of work to do in a short period of time, so you stay up until 1am to complete it, and sleep at 2 or 3am. Then the next day you're more tired than you would be, and get staffed on more materials.
 

During my analyst 1 years, I've had a lot of weeks where I was working for 80 hours. This was during a busy year (2021), and we had a lot of deals per analyst.

Typically people aren't as efficient with modeling, excel, general computer navigation in the beginning, so they take much longer to get work done. By the time I was wrapped up with my analyst program, I was probably only working around 40 hours per week to do the same amount of work that would initially have taken 70-80 hours earlier on.

Gen Z is a labor union of a generation so not anymore. People not long ago did work 80+ hour weeks as analysts though.

In a top group. Work M-F, and Sunday. Usually log off around 2-3am, barely eat or sleep. Since hitting the desk, don’t believe I’ve worked less than 80 hrs during a normal week. Hope these sleepless nights pan out at the end of the year.

nope

Echoing the other comments. I am in a good group at an MM. Due to the nature of the bank (volume shop), I have been working 9-3 am in the past few months with a lot of work on the weekends. It’s miserable and you have no time to shower, eat, etc. Consider yourself lucky and thank God you don’t have to go through that. I’ve closed 11 M&A deals and it’s soul crushing, please don’t take this for granted.

The comments show a trend where the more deals you close (or more live deals you are on), the worse the hours are. 

This means if you are not in a top group and/or do not have heavy staffing on your lap, then yea, there is not a lot of work to be done. Only when live deals happen in parallel (for instance, holding pen on the model or an IM for two different projects) will certainly guarantee 80+ or even 100+ hours.

AN 2. Have had two weeks that I have not worked at least 80 hours since starting. Average around 90 per week getting up to 110 on bad weeks working both Saturday and Sunday most weekends. And yes this is “actually working” with every days goal being getting to bed before 3am. Often times don’t have time to leave my desk to get lunch

Yes some unlucky people really do work 80-85+ hours on average a week. But also, most fresh analysts cap and wear it as a 'badge of honor' of grinding, so also take it with a grain of salt. Most people are at work from say 9-10am to 10pm - 3am but are not working 24/7 in that timeframe, plus many banks don't have analysts working past 5-7pm on a Friday and/or try to have a protected Saturday policy, so that inherently gives back a lot of time to people. Live deals, you can easily clock 100+ (I've recorded 120+ before), but that is not the regular.

That said, some unlucky analysts do get absolutely wrecked and average a lot more (depends on bank, group, and deal / market environment). I'd say in my banking days, I see most people average anywhere from 65 -75 actual working hours a week, but some poor bankers get wrecked way more and pull 80 - 90 during their 2-3 year stint

I'm going to add some perspective here for all the finance monkeys to realize how good they have it. My current profession is a soldier in the Army. My standard day is something like: wake at 4am to hit the gym at 430, show up to work at 630, work until noon, return from lunch an hour later, and finish the day between 530 and 730 PM. If you count the 1-1.5 hours at the gym as work, which I do as maintaining fitness is literally in my job description and I can be thrown out if I don't maintain it, then that's 12-13 hours of real, hard work. And that's on a normal week. When you're prepping to go the field or deploy, add an hour to that. And then I'll throw in my most recent field training for reference. We did a three week, no weekend off, field op that focused on night ops. It was 18 days of: wake at 0800, train and do mission simulation until 8pm, then put on NODs and do more mission training at night until 2 or 3 AM. That's 18 or 19 hours a day of continuous, physically demanding work. And not even counting having to pull night/fire guard shift every fourth day where you lose an hour of sleep.

I get that 99% of WSO users have never even considered serving, but I just want the perspective out there of what kind of hours we as humans are able to do. Working in high finance can be incredibly lucrative, certainly more than my career, but just remember what other people are doing.

Yes, have definitely hit 100+ hrs consistently on M&A deals.

Consider yourself lucky if you haven’t.

Friend in IB definitely counts the time he's playing cod while waiting for comments as part of the "hours", but also know people who are genuinely locked in for the 80

Regarding actual time spent working, think most people would be between 40-50 hours per week for most of the year, with a few weeks or month periods where they may need to work longer, but definitely some weeks that are more relaxed as well

People should take more pride in working less on the job, rather than more

I think my group loves to create work for no reason and are shitty planners and managers. 90 hours is the norm on my end. Very rarely less than 70 and more likely to be 100.

Yes.  I'm in a sweatier group now than in my analyst days, but also actively avoid work much more than in my analyst days, so on the whole have fewer of them.  In large part, bad clients and MDs dictate whether or not you're clocking those hours and there are no shortage of them.  If it's such a foreign concept to you that you don't actually believe someone is working those hours w/ any consistency, you're very fortunate. 

It’s always going to be a 168 hour workweek. One big lead per month takes you forward when things are good, time logged on research, documentation, and communications is not the KPI. Organic social angles (friend-of-a-friend) under a mutually warm context is the only way that major deals are ever sourced.