What does an investment banking analyst do all day?
An investment banking analyst spends the day building and checking models, making pitch book and deal pages, and turning comments from the associate and VP. The work is mostly execution: getting numbers right and pages clean, fast, for a client meeting or a live deal. The judgment comes later, and the day bends around whatever the senior bankers need by tomorrow morning.
Updated November 6, 2026. Live data checked against each firm's own careers site 1m ago.
What does a typical analyst day look like, hour by hour?
There is no fixed schedule, because the day runs on deadlines set by clients and senior bankers. But most analyst days have the same shape: a quieter morning catching up, a middle of the day full of calls and new requests, and an evening when the comments arrive and the real turning starts. The sequence below is a composite of a normal day on a team with one live deal and a couple of pitches, not any one bank's schedule.
- Morning: check email for anything that came in overnight, update the deal's tracking list, and pull any market data the team needs (share prices, recent comparable deals, trading multiples).
- Late morning: join an internal call or a client call. You mostly listen and take notes on what changed, because every change becomes a task for you.
- Midday: work the request list. Update the model for a new assumption, build a comps table for a pitch, or fix the formatting on twenty pages so they match the bank's template.
- Afternoon: send drafts to the associate, answer questions from lawyers or the client's finance team on the data room, and start the next pitch book.
- Evening: the VP or director reviews the book and sends comments, often in a marked-up PDF. You turn them, check every number ties to the model, and send a clean version back.
- Late: a second round of comments, or a quiet night if nothing is live. On a busy deal you stay until the draft is final for the morning.
What are the main pieces of work?
Almost everything an analyst produces falls into a handful of buckets. Learn the names now and you will understand every coffee chat story you hear, because bankers describe their week in these terms.
- Pitch books: decks sent to a company to win a mandate. Market update, the bank's credentials, valuation ranges, a list of possible buyers or targets.
- Models: three-statement models, DCFs, LBOs, and merger models, usually built from a template and adapted for the company.
- Comps and precedents: tables of trading multiples for similar public companies and multiples paid in past deals.
- Deal execution: the confidential information memorandum, the management presentation, buyer lists, the data room, and process letters.
- Admin that matters: tracking lists, calendar invites, call notes, and making sure every page is the latest version.
Who do you work with during the day?
A deal team is a small pyramid. You report to an associate, who reports to a VP, who works for a director and a managing director. The MD owns the client relationship and wins the business. The VP runs the deal day to day. The associate checks your work and turns it into the story. You build the numbers and the pages.
Outside the team, you will deal with the bank's own specialists (capital markets, leveraged finance, the graphics or presentation team) and with outsiders: the client's CFO and finance staff, lawyers, accountants, and on a sell-side deal, the buyers' teams asking questions about the data.
Which IB programs are open right now?
This is the job the summer analyst program trains you for. The table below is read from each bank's own careers site: Open means we saw the live posting there, Expected means last cycle's public record says it is coming, and No data yet means neither.
What does the work actually teach you?
The day sounds like formatting, and early on a lot of it is. What it builds is a habit of getting numbers exactly right under time pressure, a working knowledge of how companies are valued and how deals are financed, and the ability to read what a senior person wants from three words in a margin comment.
That is why the path keeps so many doors open. Private equity, hedge funds, and corporate development teams hire former analysts because those analysts already know how to build the model, read the company, and survive the deadline.
How can you prepare for the job before you get it?
You do not need to be fast in Excel on day one, but you should know what each piece of work is for. A sophomore can get most of the way there in a few weekends.
- Learn the three statements and how they link. Every model starts there.
- Build one comps table for a public company you know, using its filings and a few peers.
- Make a five-page pitch for that company in PowerPoint, with consistent fonts, aligned boxes, and every number sourced.
- On coffee chats, ask the analyst to walk you through their last week. You will hear this structure in their answer.
Questions students ask
- How many hours does an investment banking analyst work?
- Long hours are normal across the industry, and they track how many live deals your group has more than the name on the door. The path page gives the general range; ask current analysts on calls what their own group is like.
- Is the job really mostly formatting?
- At first, a lot of it is pages and checking. Within the first year most analysts own real parts of the model and talk directly to the client's finance team.
- Do analysts talk to clients?
- Yes, more as they get experience. Early on you join calls and take notes; later you run diligence calls with the client's finance team on your own.
- What software do analysts use?
- Excel and PowerPoint above all, plus a market data terminal such as Bloomberg or FactSet and the bank's own templates and add-ins.
- Is a summer analyst's day the same as a full-time analyst's?
- Close to it. Summer analysts get real work on live deals and pitches, usually with a bit more structure and training around it.