Financial Analyst Salary in Chicago, IL 2026,
$101,750 Median | BLS + Market Data

Chicago financial analysts earn a BLS median of $101,750/yr, or $48.92 an hour, across the Chicago-Naperville-Elgin metro, with a published band from $67,480 to $167,300. That is 1.0% below the US median for financial and investment analysts. BLS counts 17,150 analysts in the metro.

Barely — the metro runs 0.6% above the Illinois statewide figure, which is really a statement that Illinois's analyst workforce essentially is the Chicago region. Among peer metros Chicago sits above Los Angeles at $102,260 only marginally behind, and close to Houston at $101,660, Austin at $101,530, Atlanta at $100,830 and Dallas at $100,350 — a cluster of large metros that price this occupation very similarly.

Less than you would expect from this figure, and much more than this figure shows. OEWS measures wages and salaries. Proprietary trading firms, market makers and hedge funds in this metro pay a modest base and a discretionary or formulaic share of profit that can dwarf it, and none of that variable component appears in a published median. The trading cluster also employs far more engineers, quantitative researchers and traders than it does people coded as financial analysts. So the effect on this occupation's published wage is real but diluted — visible mainly in the $167,300 at the 90th percentile.

Not a state licence — Illinois does not license the occupation. What employers screen on is the CFA charter for investment roles, FINRA registrations where the position involves securities activity (those are sponsored by an employer, not obtained independently), and, in this metro more than most, practical programming ability. Chicago's finance employers hire analysts who can work directly with data rather than only with spreadsheets, which is a legacy of the quantitative culture the derivatives industry built here.

It is a strong one, with a particular shape. The metro has genuine depth in derivatives, market making, asset management and corporate headquarters finance, and the flat state tax with no city wage tax means take-home compares well against markets with higher headline pay. What it does not have is New York's investment banking scale, so analysts aiming at bulge-bracket coverage careers usually leave. Analysts aiming at trading, quantitative work, asset management or large-corporate finance generally do not need to.

Understanding this page requires understanding what OEWS collects: wages and salaries paid by employers, including some regular bonuses, but not the variable profit-sharing arrangements that structure pay across much of Chicago's trading and investment community. In a corporate FP&A career the published band is a good description of reality. In a market-making or hedge fund seat it describes the floor, not the outcome. Neither is wrong; they are different pay structures, and this metro contains an unusually high proportion of the second kind. Reading the 90th percentile as the ceiling of finance pay in Chicago would be a serious mistake.

Chicago accounts for 4.74% of national employment in this occupation — well above its share of the overall US workforce. That over-representation is the honest measure of the metro's finance cluster, and it is more informative than the wage. It means analyst work here is abundant and the market is deep enough that changing employers rarely means changing city. For someone early in a finance career, depth of market is usually worth more than a few percent on a median, because it determines how many times you can move without moving house.

The upper part of this band in Chicago rewards a specific combination that is less pronounced elsewhere: financial reasoning plus real quantitative and programming skill. The derivatives industry created a local labour market in which analysts are expected to handle data directly, build models that run rather than models that render, and understand instruments with non-linear payoffs. Analysts who have that combination compete for the risk, quantitative and buy-side seats that reach toward the $167,300 at the top of this range. Analysts who do not still have a large and well-paid corporate finance market to work in — it simply tops out closer to the middle of this band.