The RTO Premium: How In-Office Mandates Are Reshaping Compensation Expectations
While much of the technology industry settled into hybrid working patterns, trading firms largely didn't follow. That gap hasn't closed, but candidate attitudes toward it have shifted significantly, and it's changing what a competitive offer actually looks like.
Do trading firms still require full-time in-office attendance?
Overwhelmingly, yes, and this varies less by firm than people assume. In New York and Chicago, five days on-site remains the standard across top multi-strategy hedge funds and proprietary market makers, with a small number of firms operating a four-day on-site model with a remote Friday. In London, four to five days on-site is standard across front-office and core infrastructure roles, with limited hybrid flexibility at a handful of firms. Across Hong Kong and Singapore, five-day on-site expectations are strict, with hiring managers specifically citing the value of co-location with local trading desks. Genuinely remote roles are effectively non-existent across all of these markets.
Do candidates from Big Tech or fintech backgrounds simply refuse these arrangements?
Rarely outright. Candidates currently on a two to three day hybrid arrangement don't typically reject a five-day mandate on principle, they price it into their compensation expectations instead. Moving from hybrid to a full in-office mandate has become a straightforward, explicit trade candidates are willing to make, provided the number reflects what they're giving up.
What does that compensation premium actually look like?
Candidates making this move routinely benchmark their minimum acceptable total compensation in the region of $450,000 to $500,000 or more in the US, or £250,000 to £350,000 or more in London, explicitly citing the loss of schedule flexibility as part of that calculation. Candidates specifically look for this premium to show up in guaranteed liquid cash and first-year sign-on compensation, rather than long-term unvested equity, partly to directly replace the unvested tech stock they're walking away from.
Does where a candidate currently lives affect how they respond to in-office requirements?
Yes, noticeably. Candidates based in commutable secondary hubs, for example a shorter regional commute into New York, or an outer-commuter-belt location around London, tend to push back hardest initially, often attempting to negotiate a three-day arrangement before accepting that full-time trading floor co-location is a genuine requirement rather than a negotiable preference.
Has candidate resistance to this changed over time?
Yes, meaningfully, over roughly the last two years. Eighteen to twenty-four months ago, candidates more frequently pushed back on five-day requirements outright, often expecting trading firms to eventually adopt a Big Tech-style hybrid model. Over the last twelve months specifically, that resistance has shifted from refusal to acceptance with a financial offset. Candidates increasingly treat in-office presence as a fixed, non-negotiable feature of systematic trading culture, and the real conversation has moved to whether the compensation and career upside on offer genuinely justifies the commitment, rather than whether the requirement itself is reasonable.
Is there real data behind this trend, or is it just candidate sentiment?
Both, and they line up. Looking at our own placement data over the last two years, the actual gap between a deal being signed and a candidate's real start date has widened considerably, from around two months in early data to well over four months in more recent quarters. That's a genuine, measurable shift, not just anecdote, and it's consistent with candidates negotiating longer notice periods and more considered transitions as part of the trade-off for the compensation premium described above. A five-day mandate isn't the dealbreaker it was two years ago, but it isn't free either.
What does this mean for firms trying to attract this talent?
Firms that treat the in-office requirement as simply "how things are done" without reflecting the genuine premium candidates now expect in return are likely to lose strong candidates at the offer stage, not the interview stage, to firms that have priced this trade-off in properly from the start.
