Last year was a roller coaster ride, but a market rebound has pushed mega banks’ stock growth nearly 30% and record compensation and bonuses are likely to follow.
Leading the charge is JPMorgan Chase CEO and chairman Jamie Dimon, one of the last sitting Wall Street leaders to have navigated the 2008 financial crisis, the subsequent passage of the Dodd-Frank reform act, and now the AI boom. Dimon has spent the past 20 years atop JPMorgan and is know for rarely cashing in his stock. With that bent, he amassed an ownership stake in JPMorgan of nearly 8.5 million shares, and only began shaving off his holdings in a small handful of pre-planned sales in 2024, beginning with a sale valued at $150 million.
Dimon started off 2025 with about 7.3 million shares. With a per-share price of $239.71, his stake was valued at roughly $1.8 billion. The stock price soared to $322.22 at the end of 2025, pushing the stock value of his stake up to about $2.4 billion, which meant Dimon saw about $605.6 million in appreciation plus another $40 million in dividends. This year, he’ll see a 1.5 million stock appreciation right grant vest due to a special one-time award the board gave him in 2021. All told, through stock value gains, dividends, and compensation, Dimon will see about $770 million for his work in 2025, according to reporting by the New York Times that was verified for Fortune by independent compensation firm Farient Advisors.
“Jamie Dimon has been rewarded for his loyalty, tenure, and performance over the course of these years,” said Eric Hoffmann, vice president and chief data officer at Farient. Hoffmann noted Dimon has accumulated a lot of equity through his compensation plan, personal purchases, and via the 2021 special award designed to retain him while the board worked through succession planning.
“The stock’s appreciated by more than a third, and he’s a beneficiary of that like all the shareholders of JPMorgan are,” said Hoffmann.
Dimon’s “compensation actually paid,” a regulator-required figure determined by a Securities and Exchange Commission rule, was calculated at roughly $227 million in 2024; $105 million in 2023; and $38 million in 2022, in comparison.
And JPMorgan’s C-suite isn’t the only place seeing gains. Financial services compensation consultancy Johnson Associates called 2025 a surprisingly positive year for financial firms, despite early concerns about tariffs and geopolitical instability that could have hit compensation. Johnson Assocites’ November 2025 report, “Unexpected 2025 Rebound in a Changing Industry,” found that compensation across financial sectors exceeded expectations, with increases from 5% to 25%, depending on role and business segment.
Founder Alan Johnson told Fortune that 2025 was a year when traditional banks came “roaring back, absolutely” despite the early warning signs and uncertainties. As Johnson tells it, 2024 didn’t quite end up as strong as it could have been and people were hopeful about 2025. Cut to tariffs, which turned out not as bad as predicted while many were walked back, and the second half of the year saw more M&A, trading activity, and new highs in the stock market.
“The second half of the year was a sprint to the finish line, and the first few days of this year continue to look really good,” said Johnson.
However, there are looming challenges ahead, he warned. Headcount in financial services has increased 77% since the financial crisis, and it could decline by 10% to 20% during the next three to five years as AI transforms business operations. Johnson said most CEOs don’t like to talk about it directly, but there will be fewer jobs. His clients are already reducing their recruitment efforts to bring on fewer entry-level hires. How it will reshape traditional career trajectories is yet to be determined, he said.
“These firms have had a hierarchy that goes back decades that’s pretty well established and understood and this turns it on its head,” said Johnson. “If you hire fewer people at the bottom, how do you then develop people for the middle or the top? There won’t be as many candidates and they won’t have had the same career experience.”
“I don’t think anyone has figured that out.”
