London's Pay Survey Is Filed Every September: Hiring Senior PMs and Traders in London in 2026

Every September London publishes the most complete pay survey in the hedge fund industry, and it calls it Companies House. In August and September 2026 the London arms of the large trading firms and platforms filed their accounts for 2025. Jane Street UK Partnership LLP reported $1.48 billion of salaries, allowances and benefits across an average of 790 staff, about $1.88 million a head on the filing's own numbers, against $753 million across 688 a year earlier, or about $1.09 million. Jump Trading International's average rose 55 percent to $1.07 million. Balyasny's London partnership paid £270.3 million of wages and bonuses across an average of 177 people and added a sentence every London hiring manager should read twice: "Average compensation is not representative due to outliers from formulaic bonuses earned by portfolio managers with strong performance in the year."

The cost of a senior hire in London is the package the candidate's current firm pays, which the filings show to within a few hundred thousand dollars a head, plus the months that the contract, the regulator and the tax code add before the person trades. Every one of those inputs is public in October 2026, and most hiring plans still treat them as gossip.

What does it cost to hire a portfolio manager or trader in London in 2026?

Read the four filings above as two markets. The trading firms re-rated: a firm recruiting a trader out of a London market maker in 2026 is bidding against an employer whose average pay rose by more than half in a year, and whose 2026 bonus round has not been paid yet. The platforms did not move the same way. Point72's UK company, which employs its London investment and administrative staff, reported wages of $245.1 million across an average of 323 people, about $759,000 a head, down from about $871,000 across 304 the year before.

The averages hide the number that matters, and Balyasny's note says why. A platform's London payroll is a handful of formula payouts to portfolio managers with good years sitting on top of a much larger body of analysts, technologists and risk staff. The figure a hiring firm actually has to beat is the candidate's own formula, which no filing shows: the payout percentage, what is netted before it, the deferral that will be forfeited on resignation, and the guarantee the competing offer will carry. For a trader leaving a market maker, whose pay comes out of a firm-wide pool rather than a formula on his own book, the filing average is a closer guide to what he will expect.

Three caveats keep the arithmetic honest. These are averages across every role in the entity, technologists included. Profit allocated to members of an LLP sits outside staff costs, so partner-level pay at the partnerships is larger than the payroll suggests. And a group's accounts can include staff outside the UK. None of that changes the direction, which is that the London trading firms paid their people a great deal more for 2025 and the platforms did not. The platforms that took in more capital than they could seat are recruiting into that gap.

How long does a London hire take, from offer to first trade?

Longer than the regulator takes, which is new. Under the FCA's April 2026 reforms a firm is expected to answer a request for a regulatory reference within four weeks rather than six. The FCA's own service figures, published on 2 October 2026, show senior manager approval applications determined in a median of 25 days in the quarter to June 2026, with the middle half between 18 and 34 days, against a standard of 95 percent within two months. For the senior manager functions that need approval, the regulator has become a matter of weeks; most portfolio managers are certified by the hiring firm itself, so for them the reference is the only regulatory clock.

The contract is still a matter of quarters. The government's working paper of November 2025 counted around 5 million employees in Great Britain under a non-compete with a typical duration of around six months, with 71 percent longer than three months and some running to 24, and senior hedge fund clauses sit at the long end of that range. The paper closed in February 2026 and no government response had been published by the start of October 2026. The competition regulator's own submission endorsed a ban below a salary threshold combined with a statutory limit on length above it, which would leave a senior portfolio manager with a non-compete, possibly a shorter one. For planning purposes the calendar is the one this site set out for New York and London in February, and in 2026 the clause sets it.

Two other constraints run alongside it. The first is physical: Knight Frank reported in September 2026 that hedge funds account for 252,000 square feet of West End office demand, with new-build vacancy in Mayfair and St James's at 0.4 percent against 1.5 percent across the wider West End. A team lift-out needs desks, and in the districts the platforms prefer they are being let before they are built. The second is legal. In a New York case over a credit portfolio manager who resigned from Citadel in 2023 and joined Marshall Wace in London, Citadel asked the court for Marshall Wace's recruitment lists, plans for developing a global credit business and candidate evaluation scorecards. A hiring firm's own search file can become evidence in the dispute that follows the hire, and it should be written on that assumption.

Are hedge fund PMs and traders leaving London over tax?

Some are. The evidence says fewer than the commentary suggests, and it says which ones. HMRC's figures for the tax year to April 2025, the last before the non-dom regime was abolished, show 73,400 non-domiciled taxpayers, with around 9,000 leaving the population and around 8,600 arriving; London held 57 percent of them and 73 percent of their tax in the year before. The first figures covering the period after abolition are not due until 2027. The Office for Budget Responsibility's costing assumed around 1,200 tax-motivated departures among those ineligible for the new regime, and rated its own estimate's uncertainty "very high".

The exposure is unusually concentrated in exactly the bench a London fund hires from. Advani, Burgherr, Savage and Summers found that 23 percent of non-doms with industry information work in finance, and that in fund management, security dealing and related industries between 15 and 25 percent of top 1 percent earners are non-doms, against around 10 percent of top earners overall. Their work on the 2017 restriction is the best guide to who moves: the reform led just 0.2 percent of non-doms to leave, but around 2 percent of those who had arrived in the previous three years. The long-settled senior bench mostly stays. The recent arrival is the flight risk.

The most visible case of 2026 fits the pattern of a founder with options rather than a bench in retreat. Chris Rokos was reported in September 2026 to be preparing to move his tax residency to Greece and to open an office in Athens, where qualifying foreign residents can pay a flat €100,000 a year on overseas income. For a hiring firm, the practical rule is the one the new regime writes itself: a senior hire relocated to London from New York or Asia who has not been UK-resident for the previous ten years arrives with four years of exemption on newly arising foreign income and gains, and since April 2025 Overseas Workday Relief has run for four years, capped at the lower of £300,000 or 30 percent of total income. Year four is the retention date to plan around, and the time to discuss it is when the offer is written.

What should a fund ask hedge fund recruiters in London before a senior search?

Start from what the research says search does well and badly. Cappelli and Hamori, studying an executive search firm's own data, found that more than half the executives approached were willing to be a candidate for a job elsewhere, which is why the people worth hiring are rarely the ones looking. Bidwell, Choi and Fernandez-Mateo followed 1,342 job moves by 816 MBA alumni and found that people who moved through a search firm experienced lower horizontal mobility, with no evidence that the matches fitted better. Search finds the person who did this job somewhere else, and stops there unless it is told not to.

So the questions for hedge fund recruiters in London are less about the shortlist than about the population behind it. Which firms' staff can the search not approach, because of the recruiter's agreements with other clients, and how much of the London bench does that remove? Who on the long list sits under which clause, and when does each one expire? Has the brief named the cross-asset, bank-to-buy-side or overseas candidates that a like-for-like search will otherwise miss? And what is the plan for references, given that the old employer has four weeks to answer: who will speak to the risk manager who saw the positions day to day, and when? The fee mechanics of a retained search matter less than these four answers, because they decide whether the person hired was the best one available or the best one reachable.

Between the Budget and next September's filings

The next date that can change any of this is the Budget on 28 October 2026, which falls in the middle of the year's hiring conversations and before a single 2026 bonus has been paid. The resignations follow the bonuses in the first months of 2027, and with them the clauses start to run. The accounts for 2026, which will show what this round cost the firms that won it, will be filed at Companies House in August and September 2027. A London fund that sets its offers in the winter of 2026 with the September 2026 filings open on the desk will be the one least surprised by next September's.