Ernst & Young Salary 2026: The Bands EY Posts by Region

The four US base bands EY prints in its own job ads

Each row below is quoted from an EY job ad live on careers.ey.com, checked 29 September 2026. The higher band covers the New York City Metro Area, Washington State and California excluding Sacramento.

The Seattle Senior Consultant ad carries the clause in full: "The base salary range for this job in all geographic locations in the US is $97,900 to $179,500. The base salary range for New York City Metro Area, Washington State and California (excluding Sacramento) is $117,500 to $203,900. Individual salaries within those ranges are determined through a wide variety of factors including but not limited to education, experience, knowledge, skills and geography."

Note what the grade column carries. Every one of those ads names a service line: Financial Services Office, Risk Consulting, People Consulting, SAP. EY's consulting pay is quoted per service line and per grade, and a figure without both is a figure about nothing in particular.

A fifth at the floor of a grade, a seventh at the top

The two bands are not two independent numbers. Take the floor of each pair and the ratio holds across the ladder.

Work the Manager row by hand. The floor moves from $125,900 to $151,200, a rise of $25,300, and $25,300 divided by $125,900 gives 20.1 percent. The ceiling moves from $231,100 to $262,600, a rise of $31,500, and that is 13.6 percent of $231,100.

So the high cost band is worth about a fifth at the bottom of a grade and about a seventh at the top. The practical consequence: the regional premium matters most to someone joining near the floor, which is most new joiners. Someone negotiating at the top of a grade gains proportionally less by moving to New York, and pays full New York prices to live there.

Why no federal filing is labeled an EY consulting salary

Other firms name the grade when they file a salary with the US Department of Labor. Ernst & Young U.S. LLP does not. It files 5,153 certified records in the third quarter fiscal 2026 disclosure file, covering decisions between 1 October 2025 and 30 June 2026, and the job title field carries the occupational classification instead, sometimes followed by an internal code.

That single entity covers assurance, consulting, tax and strategy and transactions, and nothing in the record says which one a line came from. Deloitte and PwC both file through entities whose names separate consulting from audit. EY files everything through one.

The consequence for this page is worth stating plainly. No EY filing can be labeled a consulting salary with certainty. The Management Analysts code is the closest available proxy, and it covers 245 records out of 5,153.

What the 245 Management Analysts filings show, level by level

The only seniority axis in an EY filing is the prevailing wage level the government assigned, from I to IV. The record layout defines the benchmark field as "Prevailing Wage for the job being requested for First Worksite Location". It is an administrative ladder rather than EY's own grades, and EY publishes no mapping between the two.

Across all 245 records the median is $179,401, with quartiles at $149,460 and $205,000 and extremes of $72,450 and $254,667. The level II block is the interesting one. It holds 144 of the 245 records, its median of $175,000 sits well inside EY's posted Manager band, and its ceiling of $195,000 stops short of the posted Manager ceiling.

For a market reference, Kellogg reports a $190,000 median consulting base for the 38 percent of its Class of 2025 who entered consulting, plus a $30,000 median signing bonus. EY's level III median of $205,000 sits above that, and its level II median sits below.

Audit and consulting in one entity, 64,825 dollars apart

Because everything comes through one entity, the same file lets you read one occupation against another. Set the Management Analysts records beside the Accountants and Auditors records, which are the audit side of the house.

The all levels gap is $64,825. At level II it is $70,250. At level I the audit code is the higher of the two by $3,950, on 14 filings against 150, which is a sample too small to carry any weight.

This is the only audit against consulting comparison EY's own filings permit, and it runs through occupational codes rather than through job grades. Two people with the same EY business card can sit in different codes, and a code is assigned for the application rather than chosen by the employee. Treat the table as a distribution of work types, and treat the grade bands earlier on this page as the figure that describes a job title.

The city EY prices high and the city its filings pay highest

EY's posted bands put New York in the top tier, worth 20.1 percent on a Manager floor. Its filings do not put New York first.

Chicago sits $50,998 above New York on that measure, and New York carries the largest sample of the six. Before drawing a conclusion, hold the obvious caution: a city median mixes junior and senior filings, and New York's 43 records may simply skew junior. The honest statement is that the posted band and the filing sample point in opposite directions for New York, and neither source alone settles what a given New York offer will say.

What that does rule out is the assumption that a New York EY office pays more for the same work. On the posted band it does. On the filed sample it does not, and EY publishes nothing that reconciles the two. If you are weighing a New York offer against a Chicago or Houston one, the safe move is to ask the recruiter which band the requisition carries, and to ask it in writing.

What an Ernst & Young base salary band leaves out

The clause EY writes says base salary, and it means it. The filings say the same thing in federal language: the field is defined as "Wage paid to nonimmigrant workers at the First Worksite Location".

Three components sit outside both sources.

1. Annual bonus. EY's ads describe a Total Rewards package including medical and dental coverage, pension and 401(k) plans, and paid time off. No target bonus percentage appears on the ads read for this page.
2. Signing bonus. Absent from both sources. School reports give a class median of $30,000 across all consulting employers, which is the closest dated figure available.
3. Retirement contribution. Named on the ads, quantified nowhere public.

So a total first-year EY figure cannot be assembled from primary sources, and this page publishes none. Any total in circulation comes from a private survey or from self-reported entries, and neither can be audited. That gap is worth holding onto when you compare an EY offer with an offer from a strategy firm, because the two packages load their variable pay differently and the base band is the only part either firm will put in public writing. Our consulting salary guide sets out what is and is not knowable across firms.

Where an EY consulting offer moves, in order

The band is set before you arrive. What is open is the position inside it and everything bolted on. In rough order of how often each one moves:

1. Start date. Cheapest ask, most often granted, and a later start buys a rested first month.
2. Signing bonus. One time and discretionary, and the usual home for a competing offer.
3. Service line. The bands above are quoted per service line, so this choice carries money as well as career direction.
4. Office tier. Moving into the New York, Washington State or California band is worth 20.1 percent on a Manager floor before cost of living.
5. Position inside the band. The posted floor and ceiling show the room that exists. Documented prior experience is what moves you up inside it.

Take a sourced figure into that conversation. "Your own ad for this grade posts a floor of $125,900" is checkable in a minute, and it comes from EY. Our offer negotiation guide covers the rest.

Practicing the closing minute of an EY case

An EY consulting offer runs through a case interview, and the closing minute of a case is where candidates lose ground they earned. Our synthesis drill grades a closing recommendation and returns a scorecard. The weights behind it are ours, written by us and published on our method page, and no firm publishes a marking scheme of its own.

Read that as our view of what a two minute recommendation should contain. Two limits worth stating. The drill teaches no business content. And our assessment simulators are not running: the /assessments page states that 0 of 6 simulators are live, and it says so in its own text rather than in a footnote. The drills and the graded scorecard are what exists, free to open without an account.

For the format itself, our EY case interview guide covers the core consulting round and the EY-Parthenon guide covers the strategy practice, which recruits on its own timetable.

What the earlier EY page on this URL got wrong

29 September 2026. An earlier version of this page ran to about 330 words and published no figure. Its first sentence said that EY publishes nothing on consulting pay, and that an unsourced range posted on a website is not the firm speaking.

The second half of that claim still holds. The first half was false when it was written. EY prints a base salary band on its US consulting ads, with two or three regional tiers, a named floor and a named ceiling. Four of those ads are quoted above. They were public, dated, and reachable with a single request.

That version also said that EY's figures move by office, then declined to say by how much. The answer is 20.1 percent on a Manager floor between the standard band and the New York band, and it comes from EY's own wording. Declining to publish a figure that the firm itself publishes was presented as rigor. It was a failure to look.