How to read a VC compensation offer: base salary, bonus and carry

How to read a VC compensation offer: base salary, bonus and carry

A venture capital offer has three parts that behave differently, and comparing them as one number will mislead you. Base salary is the reliable annual cash. Bonus depends on how your offer defines it, and it may be discretionary rather than promised. Carry is a share of future fund profits, which means it is contingent and slow, and no honest guide can price it for you.

The salary figures below come from one survey of 2025 respondents. Treat them as a dated reference point for calibrating a conversation, not as a market price you are owed.

Compare cash and carry separately

Start by writing the offer down in three lines rather than one: base, bonus with the exact words the offer uses, and carry with the exact terms attached. Add the bonus to base only once you know whether it is guaranteed, a target, or fully discretionary.

Where the cash comes from matters too. Carta's management fee guide explains that management fees are paid by a fund's limited partners to the management company and are not profit for the fund managers, but the revenue that covers operating costs, including salaries for the general partner, investment professionals and operations staff, along with overhead and technology.

Our reading of that, not a claim from either source: the management fee is the budget your salary comes out of, so a smaller fund has less to pay you from whatever the market medians say. Ask about fund size and stage for that reason.

What Venture5's 2025 respondents reported

These are base salaries only, not total compensation, as reported in Venture5's 2025 VC Salary Survey.

The reported ranges around those quartiles are very wide. The survey records analyst base salaries running from $0 to $175,000, associates from $31,000 to $250,000, senior associates from $0 to $300,000, VPs and principals from $0 to $500,000, and investment partners from $0 to $1.4 million. A median tells you where the middle respondent sat. It does not tell you what any particular firm pays.

How much weight to put on these numbers

Read the methodology before you quote the table.

The survey polled the publisher's own audience of more than 50,000 venture and startup subscribers, in its eighth year of running. More than 700 responses were compiled, drawn from institutional VC firms, corporate venture capital teams, incubators and accelerators, and family offices. Respondents are self-selected, which means the people who chose to answer are not necessarily representative of everyone working in venture.

Geography is concentrated. The survey reports that New York and San Francisco represent over 60 percent of respondents, with Boston, Los Angeles and Chicago forming a second tier, and Austin, Washington DC, Salt Lake City and the North Carolina Triangle appearing with smaller footprints.

Titles are also slippery. The survey keeps a separate category for roles more senior than senior associate that do not map to its standard VP, principal or partner groupings, which tells you that job titles in venture do not carry consistent meaning across firms. Two people with the same title can be doing different jobs at different scales.

One more boundary. The public page carries base salary distributions by role and the methodology behind them. Full distributions, bonus detail, splits by firm type, historical comparisons and the survey's carry data sit in the downloadable report rather than on the page, so this article does not cover them and you should not assume anything about them from the table above.

So use the table to sanity-check a number, not to argue that you are entitled to one. These are 2025 responses from a particular pool, not a current, global or representative market rate. If your offer sits below a median, that is a fact about two different samples of one, and the useful next question is what the fund's economics actually support.

Read the cash offer and the carry terms

On the cash, get answers in writing to three questions. Is the bonus guaranteed, a stated target, or discretionary. What determines whether it is paid, and who decides. When is it paid, and what happens if you join or leave part way through a year. The survey notes that a bonus is not a given in venture the way it is in some other parts of finance, though many respondents across titles reported receiving one.

On the carry, the questions are different, and there are no standard answers to assume.

• Which fund does the allocation cover, and does it apply to investments made before you joined.
• What is the percentage measured against, since a percentage of a fund's carry pool and a percentage of profits on the deals you sourced are different things.
• What is the vesting schedule, including any cliff, and does vesting depend on the fund's life rather than a calendar.
• What happens to unvested and vested amounts if you leave, are let go, or the fund is wound down.
• Are you required to contribute your own capital as a condition of receiving it.
• Under what conditions does anything actually get paid, and roughly when could that be.

Ask these of your own offer. Nothing above is a universal contract term, and anything with legal or tax consequences needs a qualified adviser who has read your documents.

Compare two offers without pricing carry as cash

Here is a deliberately simple, hypothetical illustration. The numbers are made up to show the arithmetic, not observed from any source.

Suppose an offer is $130,000 base plus a $20,000 bonus described as a discretionary target. The correct way to write that down is: base of $130,000, and target cash of $150,000 if the bonus is paid in full. It is not $150,000 guaranteed, and if you compare it against another offer's guaranteed $145,000 base as though both were the same kind of number, you are comparing a certainty against a possibility.

Keep carry out of that comparison entirely. You can note the terms side by side, which fund, what percentage of what, what vesting, what departure treatment, and you can prefer one set of terms over another. What you cannot responsibly do is convert either into a dollar figure and add it to the cash, because the amount depends on fund performance that has not happened yet.

Questions to resolve before accepting

A compact checklist:

• Base salary, stated in writing.
• Bonus: guaranteed, target or discretionary, and who decides.
• Fund size and stage, since the management fee budget is what pays you.
• Carry: which fund, what denominator, vesting and cliff, departure treatment, any required contribution, and payout conditions.
• Title, and what the job actually involves, given how little titles standardize across firms.
• Review and promotion process, in writing where possible.
• Your own adviser's read on anything with legal or tax consequences.

Get as much of that in writing as the firm will put in writing. A verbal description of carry is not a carry allocation, and the difference tends to surface years later, when it is hardest to fix.

If you are still choosing a path into venture rather than comparing offers, two adjacent routes are worth understanding on their own terms. Read the scout guide for what scouting involves, which is a different arrangement from employment and not a salaried role. Fellowship programs are the other structured entry point, and like scouting they carry no promise of compensation or a job.

Sources: Venture5, 2025 VC Salary Survey, base salary quartiles and methodology as published on its salary survey page, captured 7 September 2026; Carta, "Management fees: a fund operator's playbook," 17 September 2025. Salary figures describe 2025 survey respondents and are not a current, global or guaranteed market rate.