Pay differences between MF, upper MM, smaller shops
What are the pay scales generally for megafunds, upper middle market firms, and smaller firms? How much does one make as a first year pre-MBA associate, second year pre-MBA associate, first year *post-MBA* associate, etc and how does the pay change based on where you work?
How much would a KKR first year make versus a GTCR or MDP first year versus a no-name PE fund first year?
How does the pay change as you get more senior?
I searched the forum for this but found conflicting information because some threads were from before the crash.
It depends on a lot of factors, I've seen ~1bn family office types that pay ~$300k because its an extremely small team, and I've also seen small PE shops that pay absolute dog shit in the range of 60k all in.
In general though, the megafunds will all be standard in the 240k-280k range, with some outliers in good years of 300k. Then you have the big names like GTCR which you mentioned which can pay as much or more than megafunds because of their need to attract talent and the fact that they are complete sweatshops.
Once you get below the upper mid shops and into the mid market, you can expect 180k to 250k in pay, again, totally depends.
Then you have the smaller shops that are extremely volatile in pay, from as low as $40k (experienced this myself when a potential roommate was denied a lease) up to whatever the mid markets pay.
The most important fact isn't even the size of the shop but a factor of:
I'm going to ignore your questions on senior level pay because you need to understand that PE is basically being an entrepreneur. Can you imagine how dumb it would be to ask an entrepreneurial forum how much in general entrepreneurs make? The answer is 0 - billions.
While PE seniors have a competitive base pay, the majority of their paycheck still comes from carry and doing well in general. So I'll just say you can expect 300k to millions.
^pretty good answer
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