Laid off from a bank? The first 30 days, done right

2026 has brought another wave of banking layoffs — multiple major banks, including HSBC and Citi, have announced job cuts running into the tens of thousands as AI automation and cost pressure hit middle- and back-office roles particularly hard, and several others have trimmed investment-banking and wealth-management headcount on top. If you are reading this because it just happened to you, the good news is that banking layoffs are common enough that the mechanics — severance, garden leave, the job search itself — are well understood. This guide covers what to check in the first two weeks, and how to search in a way that does not rely on the same two or three recruiters everyone else laid off this quarter is also calling.

The first two weeks: what to check before you sign anything

• Severance formula. Financial-services severance commonly runs one to four weeks of base pay per year of service, scaled by seniority and jurisdiction — treat any number you are quoted as a starting position, not a fixed rule, and compare it against your contract and your firm’s stated policy if one is published.
• Review periods exist for a reason — use them. In the US, employees 40 or older are covered by the Older Workers Benefit Protection Act, which requires at least 21 days to review an individual severance agreement (45 days for a group layoff) plus a further 7 days to revoke after signing. Do not sign on the day you are told; have an employment lawyer read anything with a release of claims in it.
• Benefits and accrued time. Confirm the exact date health coverage ends and whether COBRA-style continuation is offered, and confirm accrued but unused PTO is paid out — both are routine but easy to miss while you are absorbing the news.
• Outplacement support. Larger banks frequently fund outplacement services (resume help, career coaching, sometimes office space) as part of the package. It is already paid for — use it even if it feels unnecessary.

Garden leave and non-competes: know which one you have

These get conflated and they are not the same thing. Garden leave keeps you employed and paid, but idle — you typically cannot start a new job, and your duty of loyalty to the old employer technically continues, but the clock is running toward a fixed release date, commonly somewhere in the 30-to-90-day range for most roles (much longer, six to twelve months, is normal for senior portfolio managers and traders at some hedge funds). A non-compete, by contrast, usually is not paid and can restrict you from a competitor for six months to two years after you have already left — read the carve-outs closely, since a broad one can effectively block your whole sub-sector, not just your old desk.

Either way, the searching itself can start immediately even if the start date cannot — a real job search runs three to six months on average, so a paid garden-leave period is a genuine head start if you use it rather than wait it out.

Widen the net: most of the market is not advertising to you

The instinct after a layoff is to call the two or three recruiters you already know. That is necessary but not sufficient — a relationship-based search only ever surfaces employers who are actively paying someone to find candidates, which is a small, biased slice of who is actually hiring. Finseats indexes finance vacancies straight from employers’ own applicant tracking systems, so it includes the much larger set of employers — smaller asset managers, insurers, fintechs, credit unions, boutique advisory shops — who post roles without ever engaging a recruiter or a paid board. Two ways to use that directly in a layoff search:

• Filter the full index by your seniority band using the Analyst-to-MD ladder, or browse every employer we track to find firms you would not otherwise have thought to check.
• Set up a job alert for your function and city so new postings from employers you have never heard of reach you the day they go live, rather than after they have already worked through a recruiter’s shortlist.

Where laid-off bankers actually land

The destination usually is not “the same seat at a different bank” — headcount cuts tend to hit an entire function at once, so the whole pool of laid-off people is competing for the same shrunken set of like-for-like openings. Three routes are consistently more open:

• Fintech. Companies chronically short of people who already understand regulation, payments rails and credit risk. See our banking-to-fintech guide for what transfers and how to value the equity you are offered.
• Risk, compliance and control functions. Counter-cyclical almost by definition — regulatory obligations do not shrink when revenue does. See risk and compliance.
• Asset management and insurance. Less exposed to the trading and deal cycles driving the current cuts. See our asset management careers guide.

Update your materials before you need them

Do this in the first week, not the third. Our finance CV guide covers what a one-page CV needs to survive a six-second screen, and a portfolio page with a short video introduction does the work a two-page document cannot — showing an actual body of work rather than another bullet list of responsibilities, which matters more than usual when your last title alone no longer opens doors on its own.

Browse every finance job we index, search by exact role title, or check the coverage report to see exactly which employers and sources feed the index.