The story of where US hedge fund and financial services business happens has been the same for most of the past century: New York, Connecticut’s Gold Coast, and Chicago for derivatives. The decade leading into the pandemic saw some surface-level diversification — a few family offices in Florida, some VC money in Austin — but the core of US finance remained concentrated within commuting distance of Midtown Manhattan in a way that had been structurally stable for fifty years.
By the end of 2022, that structure had genuinely changed. Not collapsed, not inverted — New York remained the dominant center of the US financial services industry by almost every measure. But the 10 percentage points of AUM concentration that had shifted away from the New York-Connecticut-Illinois corridor between 2019 and 2022 represented hundreds of billions of dollars of managed assets and, more importantly for the talent market, thousands of senior finance professionals who were no longer anchored to those markets.
What actually moved and why
The geographic shift in US finance happened along three distinct channels that are worth distinguishing, because they have different implications for senior talent markets.
Tax-residency migration without operational migration. The first wave, which began in earnest after the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act capped SALT deductions, was primarily about establishing Florida or Texas domicile for tax purposes while maintaining substantive professional operations in New York. A hedge fund manager who spends 200 days per year in Miami and 165 in New York has technically moved, but their professional network, deal flow, and key relationships remain New York-anchored. This category produced real geographic mobility on paper but limited change in the talent market dynamics of any specific city.
Operational center-of-gravity shifts. The second wave, accelerated by COVID remote-work normalization, involved actual movement of the operational center of gravity. When Citadel moved its headquarters from Chicago to Miami in 2022, it meant that the investment committee, the portfolio management function, and the day-to-day operations of the firm were physically relocating — not just the tax residency of founding partners. This category is the one that genuinely reshapes talent markets, because it requires building or accessing deep local talent pools rather than just adjusting a tax schedule.
New firm formation in new geographies. The third wave is less visible but arguably most consequential long-term: new financial services firms founded from scratch in non-New York locations. A Series A fintech founded in Austin in 2021 has no New York legacy, hires locally, builds its network locally, and gradually contributes to the density of senior finance talent in Austin independent of any migration story. This category is slow to accumulate but compounds over time.
The Florida dynamic in 2022
By the end of 2022, Florida was the clearest story in the geographic reshaping of US finance. The state had gone from hosting roughly 25 investment management firms of note in 2019 to hosting a cluster of over 80 by late 2022. The AUM associated with those firms had grown from an estimated $60 billion to over $400 billion in a three-year period — driven primarily by hedge fund and family office relocations rather than new firm formation.
The compensation effect in Florida at the end of 2022: meaningful below New York equivalents in gross terms (typically 15% to 25% gap for comparable VP-level finance roles) but often superior in net disposable income terms for professionals in the highest income brackets, once state income tax differential and housing cost are properly accounted for. We covered the detailed math in our Miami piece.
The talent pool problem was already visible: Miami had absorbed a meaningful wave of senior finance migration but had not yet produced a deep local talent pool for the most specialized roles. Most searches we ran for Miami-based hedge fund roles in 2022 required national candidate pools. This dynamic persisted through 2023 and 2024.
Texas in 2022
Texas in 2022 was more subdued as a finance story than Florida, primarily because the Citadel announcement was specifically a Chicago-to-Miami relocation rather than a New York-to-Texas one. The Texas financial services story in 2022 was driven primarily by the Dallas-Fort Worth market, where Goldman Sachs had announced its major campus and where Charles Schwab had completed its relocation from San Francisco. The AUM numbers were smaller than Florida, but the corporate-finance and wealth-management depth was arguably already more developed.
We placed 14 senior finance professionals in Texas in 2022, up from 6 in 2021 and essentially zero in 2019. The roles were almost exclusively in Dallas-Fort Worth, almost exclusively at companies with deep New York or California roots, and almost exclusively involved candidates who had previously worked in those markets and were choosing Texas primarily for quality-of-life and tax reasons rather than because the professional opportunity was better than what they could find elsewhere.
What this meant for senior talent
For senior finance professionals, the geographic diversification of the industry created specific opportunities. The most in-demand candidates in 2022 were those who had both strong New York institutional finance credentials and genuine willingness to work from non-New York locations. Companies building out Miami or Dallas operations wanted proven talent but couldn’t always attract it from New York given the comp discount. The candidates who bridged this gap — who had the institutional credentials and the geographic flexibility — often negotiated unusually strong packages that included enhanced equity, higher sign-on bonuses, and more senior titles specifically to compensate for the perceived career risk of moving to a thinner market.
Looking ahead
The 2022 story set the trajectory that played out through 2023, 2024, and into 2025. Florida continued to grow, Texas continued to develop, and the "finance anywhere" norm continued to spread. The specific current state of the compensation and talent markets in each of these geographies is covered in our Texas market piece and Miami piece, both of which use our 2025-2026 placement data.
The competitive dynamics for talent
The geographic diversification of US finance created specific competitive dynamics that played out in interesting ways for senior talent. Companies that were building new operations in Miami, Austin, or Dallas in 2022 faced the challenge of competing for talent against both the incumbent institutions in those markets and the New York and Chicago firms that were also trying to retain the same people.
The winning approach, in our placement experience, was straightforward: be explicit and concrete about the total compensation picture including tax advantages, housing differential, and lifestyle factors, rather than relying on candidates to do the math themselves. Companies that produced detailed, specific total-compensation analyses comparing net-of-tax, net-of-housing disposable income between their market and the candidate’s current market were consistently more effective at closing candidates than companies that said "Miami is a great city" and showed a salary number 15% below NYC.
The sign-on bonus also became unusually important in this market transition: companies needed to compensate candidates for the unvested equity and near-term bonuses they were forfeiting at New York and Chicago firms, plus the transaction costs of relocation (real estate commissions, closing costs on a new purchase, moving expenses). Sign-on packages for VP-level geographic relocations to Miami and Dallas in 2022 were, in our data, running 40% to 70% above the sign-ons for purely local non-relocation hires at comparable levels.
Institutional dynamics: which firms moved operations vs. just people
Not all "migrations" in 2022 represented equivalent commitments to the new markets. Understanding the category is important for senior professionals evaluating which geographic opportunities to take seriously.
The most durable opportunities came from firms that moved genuine operational infrastructure, not just office addresses. When Citadel moved its headquarters to Miami, it moved investment committee decision-making, technology infrastructure, and the operational resources required to run a global asset management firm from a new location. When Goldman Sachs committed to a major Dallas campus, it was planning to house thousands of employees there with operational functions that would anchor the presence even through management changes.
The least durable opportunities came from "flag-planting" expansions: a small satellite office with a senior partner who spent two months per year there, with no operational infrastructure, no local recruiting, and no intention of actually moving the center of gravity away from New York. These offices frequently closed within two years, leaving the senior professionals who had made geographic decisions based on them in difficult positions.
For the current state of the Miami and Texas markets that grew from this 2022 foundation, see our detailed analyses in Miami’s rise as a finance hub and the Texas hiring market.