Dive Brief:
- Bank of America is boosting its minimum wage to $25 per hour, the Charlotte, North Carolina-based lender said Wednesday. The increase takes effect next month.
- With the move, the bank reaches a long-held goal to provide a $25 minimum hourly wage by 2025. The increase puts the minimum annualized salary for full-time employees over $50,000, the bank said.
- “Our strong and rising minimum starting salary provides opportunities for our teammates to build a long-term career at Bank of America,” Sheri Bronstein, BofA’s chief people officer, said in a news release. “Competitive compensation is one of the many ways we are helping to drive American economic growth and opportunity.”
Dive Insight:
After announcing the $25 per hour goal in 2021, Bank of America has steadily increased its minimum wage each year: The bank raised its pay floor to $21 per hour in October 2021, $22 in May 2022, to $23 in October 2023 and $24 last October.
With the step up to $25, the bank said its starting salary for full-time staffers will have risen by more than $20,000 since 2017 – when its minimum hourly wage was about $15.
BofA also noted that about 97% of employees have received awards other than regular compensation, largely in the form of the company’s restricted common stock. Close to $5.8 billion has been handed out since 2017, the lender said.
The nation’s second-largest bank is not the only big U.S. lender to raise its minimum hourly wage to $25 this year. BNY increased its pay floor to $25 per hour in March – the fourth such jump in five years. The move gave the bank’s lowest-paid workers over 50% more than they were making in 2021.
The pay increase at BofA comes days after the bank named Dean Athanasia, who oversees regional banking, and Jim DeMare, who leads the bank’s global markets unit, co-presidents. Additionally, CFO Alastair Borthwick has added executive vice president to his title.
The announcement lined up three potential successors to CEO Brian Moynihan, 65, who’s led Bank of America since 2010. He indicated, though, that he plans to stay with the lender through the end of the decade.
“I’m not going anywhere, in the short term, in the medium term,” Moynihan told Bloomberg on Wednesday, “but it takes a while to set that up and get people used to the size and scale of this company.”
