Quant Internship Pay at Top Trading Firms

Weekly intern pay clusters tightly across firms competing for the same recruiting class, with a separate bonus tied to a return offer.

Reported weekly pay for a quantitative trading or research intern at the top prop trading firms generally falls between $2,500 and $4,000, which annualizes to a figure most full-time analysts elsewhere would recognize as a strong entry-level salary. It exists because internship pay is priced almost entirely against the competition for the same small pool of candidates rather than against the intern's actual output. A ten to twelve week internship at firms such as Optiver, Jane Street, or Susquehanna (SIG) commonly totals $30,000 to $45,000 before housing support.

Internship pay at the firms recruiting most aggressively from quantitative finance and mathematics programs is reported as a flat weekly rate rather than a salary with a bonus attached, which keeps the structure simple and easy for firms to benchmark against each other during the same recruiting cycle. Candidates who have gone through multiple internship offers in the same cycle report the weekly figures across firms landing close together, generally within a few hundred dollars of each other.

This tight clustering mirrors the same dynamic that shapes first-year trader pay: firms are recruiting from an overlapping pool of candidates at the same universities in the same weeks, and a below-market internship offer risks losing a candidate to a competing firm before the summer even starts.

Beyond the weekly rate, many firms provide a housing stipend or firm-arranged housing for interns relocating for the summer, along with relocation reimbursement for flights or a moving allowance. Reported housing support ranges from a few thousand dollars for the summer to fully covered corporate housing near the office, and this component varies more by firm than the base weekly pay does.

These non-cash components rarely appear in a simple comparison of weekly rates between firms, but they can represent a meaningful share of the effective value of the internship, particularly for a student relocating to New York, Chicago, or Amsterdam for ten weeks with no local housing already arranged.