2026 · Bain
$9,000/mo
base pay for undergraduate summer interns in the US.
Bain internship page8
The three firms hire fewer than one applicant in a hundred, pay new graduates $110,000 or more to start, and now take internship applications in the second year of college. What these jobs pay, what the interviews test, where the hires come from, and how early preparation now has to start.
McKinsey, Bain and BCG are holding or raising entry-level hiring in 2026, and BCG alone drew 1.7 million applications last year. The competition now begins in the second year of college. Six numbers frame the briefing.
Consulting has its own vocabulary. These are the terms this briefing uses, in plain English.
New graduates start at $110,000 to $112,000, a base that held for four classes in a row. Bain's job postings now list $120,000, with bonuses and retirement money on top.
A new college graduate who joins McKinsey or Bain in the United States starts on a base salary of $112,000; BCG pays $110,000. Those figures held for four start classes in a row, 2023 through 2026, according to Management Consulted, a recruiting-prep company that compiles offers from its clients and the firms.1,3 For comparison, the average starting salary for the college Class of 2025 was $67,983.2
The freeze is now breaking. Bain's current US job postings list a base of $120,000 for first-year Associate Consultants and $200,000 for first-year Consultants hired from MBA programs, up from $112,000 and $192,000.4,5 The postings do not say which class the new figures cover. StrategyCase, a case-coaching site run by a former McKinsey senior consultant, reports that McKinsey will lift its US undergraduate base to $120,000 in January 2027, by moving pay from bonus into base, and that BCG has told offer holders revised letters are coming. We could not confirm either report with the firms.6
| Group | Annual base |
|---|
Before the freeze, pay rose fast. Bain's base for new graduates climbed from $83,500 for the class that started in 2018 to $112,000 in 2023, and its MBA base rose from $148,000 to $192,000 over the same years.3 McKinsey and BCG moved in step: from 2023 through 2026, each stayed within $2,000 of Bain at both levels.3,1
| Start class | New graduates | MBA hires |
|---|
Bonuses come on top, and they depend on performance. Management Consulted puts the maximum first-year performance bonus for new graduates at $18,000 at McKinsey, $22,000 at BCG and $22,500 at Bain. It says the maximum typically goes to the top 5–10% of performers, and average performers often get about half.1 Each firm also pays a $5,000 signing bonus and adds retirement money: 7.5% of qualifying pay into a 401(k) at McKinsey, 4.5% of base and bonus at Bain, and profit sharing of up to $4,400 at BCG.1
| Firm and role | Base | Signing bonus | Maximum performance bonus | Maximum first-year cash |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| New graduatesMcKinsey Business Analyst | $112,000 | $5,000 | $18,000 | $135,000 |
| New graduatesBCG Associate | $110,000 | $5,000 | $22,000 | $137,000 |
| New graduatesBain Associate Consultant | $112,000 | $5,000 | $22,500 | $139,500 |
| MBA hiresMcKinsey Associate | $192,000 | $30,000 | $40,000 | $262,000 |
| MBA hiresBCG Consultant | $190,000 | Up to $30,000 | $47,500 | $267,500 |
| MBA hiresBain Consultant | $192,000 | $30,000 | $63,000 | $285,000 |
The MBA door pays more. Business-school hires start on a base of $190,000 at BCG and $192,000 at McKinsey and Bain, with $30,000 signing bonuses and performance bonuses of up to $40,000 to $63,000.1 School data agree: Harvard Business School's Class of 2025 consultants reported a median base of $190,000, a median signing bonus of $30,000 and a median performance bonus of $40,000. The school's investment bankers started lower, at $175,000, but earned more once bonuses were counted.7
Even the internship pays at close to the full-time rate. Bain pays its undergraduate summer interns in the US a monthly base of $9,000, and a 10-week internship pays $21,000 to $22,500 across the three firms.8,1
The pay comes with long odds: McKinsey and BCG each hire fewer than 1 in 100 applicants (Part IV). The next three parts cover what the firms test, where they hire, and when the process now begins.
Every candidate faces the case interview: a client's problem, worked through live. The firms add an online test and a personal interview, and in 2026 they began piloting AI in the interview itself.
Ask the three firms what they look for and the answers overlap. McKinsey wants the “ability to think critically, tackle complex challenges, and create meaningful impact.”9 BCG's interviewers look for “Integrity / Intellectual Curiosity / Creative Thinking / Collaborative Mindset / Drive.”10 Bain wants people who are “intellectually curious, entrepreneurial, and who find challenges exciting,” with “strong academics alongside sharp analytical and communication skills.”11,12
The case interview is how they find out. A candidate is given a client's problem and works it through out loud: structuring it, doing the math and arriving at a recommendation. Bain describes it as “a structured conversation where you work through a real business problem,” and says it is looking for how a candidate thinks rather than a single right answer.13 McKinsey pairs its problem-solving interviews with a Personal Experience Interview and suggests candidates prepare “two personal examples” for each of four areas: leadership, drive, connection and growth.9
| Stage | Format at the three firms | What it tests |
|---|---|---|
| ScreenOnline test | McKinsey's Solve, a game-based problem-solving test; BCG's Casey, a chatbot-run case, according to prep firms; Bain's Sova or TestGorilla test of about 30–40 minutes, when required.14,15,16 | Problem solving, numbers and logic under time pressure |
| InterviewCase interview | A client problem worked through with an interviewer: interviewer-led at McKinsey, with a written take-home challenge for some Bain roles.17,11 | Structuring, math, synthesis and a clear recommendation |
| InterviewPersonal interview | McKinsey's Personal Experience Interview, two stories for each of four themes; a skills interview at BCG; at Bain, behavioral questions that are the same for every candidate in a role.9,10,11 | Leadership, drive, teamwork and self-awareness |
| New in 2026AI-assisted case | A case worked with a generative-AI tool. At McKinsey it can replace one of the usual cases, mostly in Europe so far; BCG is testing its own versions in select offices, and Bain tells candidates to expect AI in its process.17,18 | Judgment: questioning and checking what the tool produces |
| InternshipSummer internship | Ten weeks in the US. At Bain, “based on performance,” an intern may be offered a full-time position at graduation.1,8 | The quality of real client work, and teamwork |
Artificial intelligence has reached the junior job and, now, the interview. Sternfels said in January 2026 that McKinsey counted about 40,000 people and 25,000 AI agents.19 BCG says AI- and tech-focused services now make up more than 40% of its revenue.20 In 2025, McKinsey added an interview component that asks candidates to use a publicly available generative-AI tool to work through hypothetical client problems, Business Insider reported.21
“There's not truth in the model, there's not judgment in the model. Humans need to impose those parameters.”
— Bob Sternfels, Global Managing Partner, McKinsey & Company · HBR IdeaCast, January 202624The firms describe the same shift in their own hiring. Sternfels says McKinsey was “too focused on, ‘Did you have perfect marks?’ versus, ‘Did you have a setback and recover?’” and has changed its process to look for resilience.24 BCG's chief executive, Christoph Schweizer, says the firm has not reduced its junior intake and that new graduates are “so AI native.”25 Bain plans to add about 1,400 client-facing roles in 2026, about 12% more, and McKinsey said it would hire about 12% more people in North America in 2026 than in 2025.26,27 The firms are also adding specialists alongside generalists: BCG cites AI engineers, data scientists and industry experts, and Bain cites industry hires.20,28
In an October 2026 interview with the New York Times, Sternfels said McKinsey now looks for “an ability to learn new things” and tests it in simulations built so that pattern recognition is impossible. “What we're finding is there's no correlation to degree type.” Working with people counts for more, too. His two markers: success in a team sport, and a retail job as a teenager, where “you don't have positional authority. You have to deal with people.”29
The work behind the interview is moving the same way. Luis Garicano, an economist at the London School of Economics, describes a consultant redesigning a large airline's loyalty program: “His team finished the analysis in two weeks. Months later the program still does not exist.” The months went to winning agreement from departments inside the airline and from partners such as hotel chains and credit-card companies. “Once the analysis is cheap,” Garicano writes, “what remains is to learn what each party will actually accept, and to obtain commitments from those who are authorized to make them.”30 AI may also bring new consultants to that work sooner. In September 2026 Garicano described a junior McKinsey consultant who, three months after starting, was already talking to clients about implementation. Garicano called that the good news. The bad news, he said, is that past some point juniors' early work is worth so little that firms stop training them at all.31
Grades still matter. No firm publishes a GPA cutoff; one prep firm puts the floor near 3.5 at core recruiting schools, with 3.7 and up competitive.33 McKinsey's application can ask for test scores, including the SAT, so a high-school number can follow a student into recruiting.34 Outside the pilots, McKinsey and BCG bar AI in tests and live interviews unless a candidate is given permission, and Bain prohibits it in its online test.9,35,16
For a student, the lesson is practical. The firms test thinking that is done out loud, checked by a skeptical listener and defended under follow-up questions. McKinsey's leader describes judgment as the part an AI model cannot supply.24
The three firms hire from many colleges, but a short list supplies a large share. Two universities lead by a wide margin, and the MBA offers a second door.
McKinsey, Bain and BCG recruit on a short list of campuses. CaseCoach, a prep company, analyzed more than 4,700 people the three firms hired for US client-facing roles from 2020 to mid-2022. It found that 45% of the student hires came from 10 prestigious universities, including Harvard, Duke, Yale and Princeton.36,37
A LinkedIn count by Peak Frameworks of North American MBB consultants who finished college between 2014 and 2020 shows the same order. Harvard, with 225 consultants in the sample, and Penn, with 191, each produced about twice as many as any other school. Michigan, Yale, Stanford and Duke follow.38
| School | Total | McKinsey | Bain | BCG |
|---|
Each firm has its own favorites. In the same sample, Columbia sent 52 of its 73 consultants to McKinsey, while Berkeley, Virginia and Dartmouth leaned toward Bain. Harvard split almost evenly: 78 to McKinsey, 78 to Bain and 69 to BCG.38
The newest school reports show the same concentration. Penn's Class of 2025 sent 57 Wharton undergraduates to the three firms (McKinsey 22, BCG 19, Bain 16) and at least 44 from its College of Arts and Sciences.39,40 Wharton's count moved with the market: 73 in the Class of 2023, 41 in 2024 and 57 in 2025.39 At Harvard, 17% of seniors entering the workforce in 2026 were headed into consulting, a figure that counts firms beyond MBB.41
| Class | Share into consulting |
|---|
Within a campus, business students tend to do better. About 9% of Wharton's 2025 graduates joined MBB, against about 3% of graduates of Penn's College of Arts and Sciences, by our arithmetic.39,40 A strong business program is not a pipeline on its own, though. NYU Stern's undergraduate program sent 36 graduates to the three firms across the classes of 2021–2025, about seven a year, against 229 to PwC, Deloitte and EY LLP.42
The net is widening a little. In 2023 McKinsey's chief people officer said the firm recruits from about 1,500 schools, up from 700, and wants to reach 5,000.43 In January 2026 Sternfels said McKinsey would be “looking more at liberal arts majors, whom we had deprioritized.”44 In October he said the firm had started to widen the degrees it looks at to include art, music and history, and that on its novel problem-solving test “some of those degrees do better.”29 The firms' programs for first- and second-year students, covered in Part IV, also reach students outside the core campuses.
The MBA is the firms' other main entry point, and the main second chance for a student who did not start at a core campus. At 10 of 14 leading business schools, between 32% and 41% of the Class of 2025's graduates who took jobs went into consulting.46 Booth's class alone sent 117 graduates to the three firms.47
| School | Share into consulting |
|---|
In 2026, McKinsey and Bain moved their first internship deadlines to March of the second year of college, more than 14 months before the internship starts. The full-time offer usually follows the internship.
The internship that leads to a full-time MBB offer takes place in the summer after junior year. In 2026, the first applications for it were due in the spring of sophomore year. McKinsey moved its intern recruiting from summer to spring, Bloomberg reported in February, and Bain followed: both set a March 29, 2026 deadline for interns starting in summer 2027.50,51,52 “Competition for talent has shifted earlier, driven in part by some industries that have very early cycles, like banking,” said Blair Ciesil, a McKinsey partner.50
The other dates moved less. Bain kept a second deadline of August 31, and BCG's deadline was June 2, 2026.52,53 A year earlier, the first deadlines for the same internship had been July 17 at McKinsey, July 6 at Bain and June 23 at BCG.54
| Firm | 2025 cycle | 2026 cycle |
|---|
Bain's global head of talent acquisition, Ron Kermisch, was blunt about the reason: “We can't let McKinsey do an entire cycle before us.” He called the escalation, under way for 15 years, “a necessary evil.”50 Full-time deadlines did not follow: McKinsey's for new graduates starting in 2027 was August 11, 2026, about a month later than the year before.55,54
The internship then decides the job. Offers to Wharton's undergraduate Class of 2025 peaked in August 2024, right after junior-year internships, and 81% of surveyed graduates said a summer internship or past employer helped their search.39 Bain tells its undergraduate interns that, “based on performance,” they may be offered a full-time position upon graduation.8
The firms now reach students well before that deadline. Most of their early programs are for sophomores, the year the first applications fall due, and several are aimed at students from groups the firms want to reach.
| Program | Who it is for | Format and timing |
|---|---|---|
| BainConsulting Kickstart | Second-year undergraduates | A three-part virtual webinar series in October; 2026 applications are due October 5.56 |
| BainCREW | Second-year undergraduates | Sessions with women leaders in strategy consulting; the 2026 program has closed.57 |
| BainFirst Forward | First-generation or lower-income sophomores | A 1.5-day, in-person summit, held May 28–29, 2026.58 |
| BainBuilding Entrepreneurial Leaders | Second-year students interested in the Black at Bain and Familia at Bain affinity groups | 2026 applications were due February 1.59 |
| BCGBCG Launch | Undergraduates and non-MBA master's students in the US and Canada | A virtual series; the 2026 portal closed May 29.60 |
Candidates prepare for the case interview with repetition. Prep firms suggest about 30 live practice cases before a first interview and 40 to 60 before final rounds.61,62 Campus consulting clubs supply practice partners, workshops and firm contacts, and networking counts: 69% of surveyed Wharton graduates in 2025 said it helped their job search.39
We found no MBB program for high-school students. The closest options are free: BCG's virtual job simulations run on Forage, which requires users to be 16 or older, and the Wharton Global High School Investment Competition drew more than 6,300 registered teams in 2025–26.63,64,65
For families, the timing is the point. The first MBB deadline now falls about 18 months after a student starts college. If 2026 timing holds, today's high-school seniors will apply in the spring of 2029, and today's tenth graders in the spring of 2031, by our arithmetic. Preparation that once could wait until junior year now has to begin before college.
The case interview rewards a way of thinking that can be learned long before college. The Boardroom's week is built around it.
The Boardroom is a five-day business program in Boston for high-school students, taught by the case method that leading business schools use. Its week follows the path of a real decision. Students size up a market, read the financial statements, put a value on a company, decide whether to buy it, and defend that recommendation to a panel of working executives.66
That sequence is the case interview described in Part II, stretched across a week and scaled to a high-school student's starting point. It does not replace the college, the practice cases or the internship that come later. It gives a student the foundation each of those stages assumes, at an age when there is still time to build on it, and a first-hand answer to “why business?” for college applications.
Each day of the program rehearses a part of what MBB recruiting tests later.
| Day | In the room | What it builds | Where MBB tests it |
|---|---|---|---|
| MondayThe Market | Why some companies dominate for decades and others are toppled overnight. Where the advantage lies, and where the profit hides. | Structuring a messy problem | The start of a case interview, when the candidate lays out how to work through the client's problem.13 |
| TuesdayReading the Money | The three financial statements, read on real, name-brand companies side by side. | Comfort with numbers | Case math, and the online tests that screen problem solving before any interview.14,15,16 |
| WednesdayWhat's It Worth? | How a company is priced, and why the right number is an argument the advisor has to make. | Turning numbers into a judgment | Explaining what the numbers mean. Bain says it looks for how a candidate thinks, not a single right answer.13 |
| ThursdayThe Deal | A real acquisition lands on the table. Teams act as the advisors and decide whether to do the deal, and at what price. | A recommendation, made as a team on a deadline | The case's final recommendation, and the “Collaborative Mindset” BCG lists among its criteria.10 |
| FridayThe Board | Teams present their recommendation to a panel of working executives and take the questions a real board would ask. | Defending a view under questioning | Interviewers' follow-up questions, and McKinsey's AI-assisted case, which tests how well a candidate questions an answer.18 |
Four capacities, each matched to something the earlier parts of this briefing show the firms test.
Students learn to turn an open question, such as whether a company should do a deal, into smaller questions they can answer with evidence.
Revenue, margins, cash flow and debt, read across three statements. This is the vocabulary a case assumes once the math starts.
Every case ends in a decision: do the deal or walk away. Students learn to commit to a recommendation and take responsibility for it.
Friday's board session puts each team in front of working executives. For a high-school student, it is the closest thing to a final-round interview.
A practical sequence from ninth grade to the first internship, built from the recruiting calendar in Part IV.
Monday to Friday, 9 to 4, in the heart of Boston. Each session is a single cohort that ends the week presenting a real recommendation to a board of working executives.
Every figure in this report comes from a named public source and was checked against the original document or a reputable copy of it. Pay figures are disclosed bases, school medians or ranges compiled by prep companies; individual offers vary by office, role and year. Where a figure comes from a prep company or practitioner analysis rather than a firm or a school, the text or the note says so. Recruiting calendars move from year to year; dates reflect postings and reporting available as of October 1, 2026.
The Boardroom is an independent education program. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by McKinsey & Company, Boston Consulting Group, Bain & Company or any university or other organization named in this briefing; names are used only to describe the public landscape of consulting recruiting. The preparation sequence in Section 5.3 is general guidance, and every student's path will differ.
© 2026 The Boardroom. This briefing is provided for informational purposes for prospective families and the counselors who advise them. Figures reflect the public sources cited above as of October 1, 2026. Quotations are reproduced as published.
McKinsey, Bain and BCG now take applications from college sophomores.
The preparation can start sooner.
The Boardroom gives high-school students a week inside the way business decisions are made: the market, the numbers, the price, the deal and the board.
