Deutsche Bank has London’s lowest dinner allowance apparently

Pretty much every bank offers a dinner allowance – basically a subsidy for the cost of your (ordered in) dinner on days you have to stay in the office past a certain time (usually around 8pm) to work. We’ve yet to find a bank which doesn’t actually offer this little (but well-appreciated) perk – but which bank is most generous? And which is stingiest?

Well, courtesy of Instagram meme age ibd_memes, we might have an answer. The page ran a salary survey for London-based investment bankers, which included a question about exactly that.

The most generous banks surveyed were Commerzbank and Harris Williams, the American boutique, which both offered a £40 subsidy for dinner. The least generous bank surveyed was Deutsche Bank (who refused to comment on the article), which apparently offers an allowance of just £19.

Aside from those three, all banks fell into the £20-£30 range, with no particular pattern emerging – Barclays, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman all offered £25, for instance. Some boutiques were more generous, such as PJT and PWP, which both offered £28 subsidies, whilst some were not, such as Rothschild and Lazard, which both offered £20.

That might not seem like a huge difference in the grand scheme of things, but it really is. Bankers are regularly working into the evening, especially in investment banking, and it can be pretty safely assumed that the dinner allowance will be taken up on. 260 workdays in a year could mean over £10,000 claimed for just one banker’s dinner allowance (assuming Commerzbank-levels of generosity). Banks also have special lunch and dinner allowances for weekends.

Deutsche Bank declined to comment.

Here’s the full table (you can click “subsidy” to sort it from highest to lowest):

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