Bonus Structures: VC Holds Steady While PE Drifts Toward Discretion

What’s driving VC and PE bonus structures in 2026? New data from the Thelander x PitchBook Investment Firm Compensation Survey shows that bonus structures across VC and PE firms remain tilted toward discretionary pay — but the similarity ends there. 

The Wall Street Journal reported this morning that Wall Street’s 2025 bonuses reflect a “gangbusters” year – payouts largely based on “teams’ and firms’ performance.” It’s a timely backdrop for what Thelander data shows happening inside VC and PE firms, where the question of how bonuses are determined tells a more nuanced story.

Bonuses can be determined in one of two ways:
— Discretionary, meaning entirely at a partners’ judgement without defined criteria or metrics
— Performance-based, tied to explicit measures of individual and/or firm output

Across both VC and PE, discretionary bonuses are the dominant model — but the degree and direction of change differs markedly by asset class. 

In venture capital, the split has remained stable for three consecutive years, with 66% of firms using discretionary bonuses and 34% using performance-based structures in 2024, 2025, and 2026. 

Private equity tells a different story. Discretionary bonuses were already more prevalent than in VC to start, at 71% in 2024, and have continued climbing — reaching 76% by 2026, while performance-based pay has correspondingly shrunk from 29% to just 24%.

What’s the bottom line? The result is a widening gap between the two asset classes: where VC bonus philosophy has held steady, PE is drifting further toward partner discretion and away from defined performance criteria. By 2026, PE firms are 10 percentage points more likely than VC firms to use discretionary bonuses (76% vs. 66%) — up from just a 5-point gap in 2024. The specifics depend on your firm’s unique compensation needs.

Want to see how your actual and/or target bonuses stack up to market? Fill out the Thelander x PitchBook Investment Firm Compensation Survey today to access real-time benchmarks for all the job titles you complete. 

Categorised in: Data Drops

This post was written by jody