Big Wall Street Banks Are Limiting Workweek Hours — to 80 Junior bankers are reporting 100-plus hour workweeks. Now, Wall Street's overwork culture is back under scrutiny.
By Sherin Shibu Edited by Melissa Malamut
Key Takeaways
- JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America are putting new policies in place to curb overwork.
- JPMorgan is limiting the workweek to 80 hours for junior investment bankers for the first time, the WSJ reported Wednesday.
- Bank of America is rolling out a new time reporting tool next week that could make it harder for junior bankers to downplay how many hours they spend in the office.
An 80-hour workweek means working from 8:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. six days a week — not the norm for most Americans, who log an average of 34 hours per week.
But for some junior bankers on Wall Street, an 80-hour week maximum workweek will be a relief.
JPMorgan Chase is now instituting a limit to working hours after new investigations showed that junior investment bankers are putting in more than 100 hours per week.
Bank of America is also trying to enforce an 80-hours per week cap with a new time reporting tool, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, citing anonymous sources. The tool will reportedly roll out next week and ask junior bankers to log daily hours instead of weekly hours. It also asks for more detail about what the bankers are working on and which senior employees are managing them on each assignment.
The changes come after the death of 35-year-old Bank of America junior banker Leo Lukenas III earlier this year. Lukenas joined Bank of America in 2023 as an associate and passed away in May 2024 from a blood clot in his heart. Though the coroner's report didn't link the death to overwork, Lukenas had reportedly been working 110-hour weeks on a $2 billion acquisition for the bank and indicated before his death that he wanted to leave because of the long hours.
Related: JPMorgan Says Its AI Cash Flow Software Cut Human Work By Almost 90%
A WSJ investigation in August reported that Bank of America bosses routinely pressured junior bankers to lie about the number of hours they worked, circumventing policies implemented a decade ago after the death of an investment banking intern in Bank of America's London office.
The 21-year-old intern, Moritz Erhardt, had epilepsy and died from an epileptic seizure. He had been working until 6 a.m. for three days in a row. Bank of America subsequently asked junior bankers to take at least four weekend days off per month and to take their yearly vacation time.
After the investigation, Bank of America asked junior bankers to go to higher-ups or human resources if managers overworked them. The new time reporting tool is also intended to make it harder for junior bankers to downplay how many hours they spend in the office and keep managers more accountable to the bank's limits.
Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley still have no policy limits on how many hours analysts and associates can work, but Goldman has a "protected Saturday" policy that blocks out Friday from 9 p.m. to Sunday at 9 a.m. as time off.
