Bank of America raises minimum hourly pay to $24, as tellers flee the industry

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A Bank of America branch in Manhattan. The country's second-largest bank is increasing the wages of its lowest-paid workers, who will start earning at least $24 per hour in October. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images) / Getty Images

Bank of America is pledging to pay its bank tellers and other hourly workers at least $24 per hour starting in October.

The company says that this pay raise, from $23 per hour currently, will affect “thousands” of its 212,000 employees. The wage increase will particularly affect tellers and other customer-facing employees, such as call-center workers.

Several big banks have increased their starting pay for hourly workers in the past few years, in part due to the difficulty of attracting workers to these relatively unglamorous and non-remote-friendly jobs. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that banks will need to fill some 27,000 teller positions every year for the next decade.

Bank of America has been raising wages relatively aggressively for its hourly workers since early 2019, when it paid $15 per hour. The bank has previously said that it plans to pay all such employees $25 per hour by next year. And even today, the company is already paying significantly above the median wage for all U.S. bank tellers, who earned $18.10 per hour in 2023, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Yet this latest increase also underscores the vast income disparities across the financial industry, between the hourly retail workers who deal with customers and the bonus-happy investment bankers, traders, and executives whose huge pay packages contribute to Wall Street’s well-heeled reputation.

The median Bank of America employee made $124,000 in 2023, and CEO Brian Moynihan made 230 times that: His most recent compensation package was valued at $29 million.