Goldman Sachs employees have quietly had their pay juiced by circa $3bn this year
Goldman Sachs does not pay badly. It does not necessarily pay enough to allow many employees to retire aged 33, but accounts filed this week suggest it is on track to pay an average of $476k per head this year in combined salary and bonus.
đ„Follow us on WhatsApp for news alerts.đ„
There is more to pay at Goldman Sachs than the headline numbers, though.
When Goldman Sachs pays bonuses, it - like other banks - pays some of the bonuses in Goldman Sachs stock, and this stock is deferred over a three year period. If Goldman Sachs' stock rises in price during the deferral period, employees benefit.
Goldman Sachs stock has risen in price a lot. In January 2023 it was trading at around $345 per share. In July 2026, it peaked at over $1,000 per share. Goldman's rising share price has benefitted senior people like CEO David Solomon. It has also benefited everyone else with Goldman stock, seemingly by circa $3bn in total.
The $3bn uplift is suggested by Goldman's regulatory filings and its Q3 accounts filed this week.
In a footnote to this week's accounts, Goldman said it received a $975m tax benefit from share awards during the first nine months of 2026. $895m of this was booked in the first quarter.
This tax benefit is the tax that Goldman saved because the higher value of employeesâ shares when they were delivered became tax deductible, rather than their lower value when they were granted. If Goldmanâs tax rate was around 28%, the $895m saving implies that the share awards had increased in value by around $3bn since they were granted. This money has flowed through to employees in 2026 (although the shares can't actually be sold until next year).
Not all Goldman's 47,500 employees will have benefitted, though. The firm declined to comment for this article and Goldman doesn't say how widely its historic stock bonuses were dispersed. If 20,000 employees received the historic stock, this year's uplift would be $150k each; if 5,000 did, it would be $600k.
This is clearly a fine thing for Goldman's employees. However, recent restricted stock units (RSUs) given to staff at Goldman may be sadly less lucrative.
Filings show that Goldman issued 3.5m RSUs to staff in early 2026 for 2025 bonuses. The price at which these RSUs were granted hasn't yet been divulged, but it was likely between the $930 and $975 at which Goldman's shares were trading in late January. The stock has since fallen to around $925.
| RSUs granted during | Average grant-date value per RSU | Liquidity discount included |
|---|---|---|
| 2023 | $329.23 | 4.5% |
| 2024 | $365.28 | 3.9% |
| 2025 | $588.11 | 4.1% |
Follow me on X. Follow me on LinkedIn.
Have a confidential story, tip, or comment youâd 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.
