Reviewed by Joanne M. Farquharson · Last reviewed: September 21, 2026
This article is for general information only and does not constitute legal, tax, or HR advice. Consult a qualified professional for your situation.
Three cities, three different bets on what a US fintech business needs most.
New York puts a team next to the buyers and charges accordingly. Charlotte offers banking depth at a fraction of the payroll. Miami provides a Latin America bridge and the most employer-friendly contract law of the three.
Picking between them is rarely a question about the cities. It is a question about who signs your contracts and what you are willing to pay to be near them.
Four questions to answer before you pick a city
Who signs your contracts? Selling to tier-one banks and asset managers is a New York job, because that is where the buying committees sit. Selling to regional banks, credit unions and payment processors points somewhere cheaper.
Which regulator matters to you? Money transmission is licensed state by state in the US, not federally. New York’s Department of Financial Services is the most demanding supervisor in the country.
What will the team actually cost? Salary is the smaller half of the question. Employer on-costs, benefits expectations and the local market rate for a competing offer all move with the city.
What do state employment rules do to your contracts? Non-competes, pay transparency and notice practice differ sharply across these three states. Those differences change what you can put in an offer letter.
The licensing question that comes before the city question
Many UK fintechs arrive expecting a single US regulator and find fifty of them instead.
Money transmission is licensed at state level. Each state runs its own requirements, and applications are filed through the Nationwide Multistate Licensing System, known as NMLS.
There is a partial shortcut. The Multistate Money Services Businesses Licensing Agreement Program, or MMLA, coordinates review across participating states. The Washington State Department of Financial Institutions notes that the MMLA suits companies seeking licensure in more than five states.
The practical point for a city decision is that licensing and location are separable. Your licensing map is driven by where your customers are, not by where your office sits. So do not let a licensing plan force a city choice, or the reverse.
If your product does not touch customer funds, this section may not apply to you at all. Payments infrastructure, lending software and risk tooling often avoid money transmission entirely.
New York: closest to the buyers, hardest on the budget
New York Metro holds the largest tech talent pool in the United States at 394,300 people, and ranked fourth in CBRE’s Scoring Tech Talent 2026. The workforce grew by 30,640 to reach that figure, overtaking the San Francisco Bay Area in 2025.
Depth is not the reason most fintechs choose New York, though. Proximity is. The institutions you want as customers run their procurement from the same square mile.
New York also sits among the four largest US clusters for AI-specialty talent, which matters if your product involves underwriting models, fraud detection or document processing.
What New York costs you
The cost of proximity is visible in what the incumbents pay. New York’s securities industry hit a record 201,500 jobs in 2024, with an average salary including bonuses of $505,630, according to the New York State Comptroller. That is nearly five times the average across the rest of the city’s private sector.
You are not competing with that number for every role. You are competing with it for the senior commercial hires who already work at your target customers.
That single fact reshapes a UK budget. A London-benchmarked package for a head of sales will not clear the bar, and candidates will tell you so at second interview. Our US salary benchmarking guide covers how to build a defensible range before you start recruiting.
Salary is also only part of it. Employer-side costs, health cover and retirement contributions add materially to the headline figure, which we break down in the true cost of US expansion.
Employment rules in New York
Job adverts must carry a compensation range. New York State’s pay transparency law applies to employers with four or more employees, and covers promotions and transfers as well as new roles. Our guide to US pay transparency laws sets out how the state rules now differ.
Non-competes remain governed by common law. Governor Hochul vetoed a statewide ban in December 2023, and no prohibition has been enacted since. A narrower bill, S9759, was reintroduced in April 2026 targeting people earning $500,000 or more, and it sits in the Senate Labor Committee.
New York’s minimum wage is $17.00 in New York City, Nassau, Suffolk and Westchester. It is $16.00 across the rest of the state, per the US Department of Labor.
Employment is at-will in New York, as in almost every US state, which changes how termination works compared with UK practice. Our at-will employment guide explains what that means for international employers.
Charlotte: banking depth without New York payroll
Charlotte is the quiet answer, and it is the one most UK fintechs have not considered.
Bank of America is headquartered there, and it is the second largest US bank by assets. Truist, one of the country’s largest regional banks, is also based in the city, according to the Charlotte Regional Business Alliance.
The more useful number for a hiring plan comes from CBRE. Charlotte has 28% of its tech talent working in finance, insurance and real estate. That is a workforce already fluent in the domain, which shortens onboarding for anyone joining a payments or lending product team.
What Charlotte gives you that New York does not
The obvious answer is cost, and it is real. The less obvious answer is retention.
In New York, a strong engineer or account executive has a dozen competing offers within walking distance. In Charlotte the alternatives are mostly large banks, which is a different kind of employer with a different pace. A well-run fintech can be the more interesting option rather than the more expensive one.
What Charlotte does not give you is a dense venture ecosystem or a deep pool of consumer-facing product designers. It is a business-to-business market, and it suits companies selling into banks rather than around them.
Employment rules in North Carolina
North Carolina has no state pay transparency law, so job adverts carry no compensation disclosure requirement. The state minimum wage matches the federal rate at $7.25, which rarely binds on fintech roles but does affect support or operations hiring.
Non-competes are governed by state case law rather than a statutory earnings threshold, unlike Colorado or Virginia.
Miami: the Latin America bridge, and the strongest contracts
Miami earns its place for two reasons, and only one of them is the one people talk about.
The first is market access. A Miami base gives a UK fintech a workable route into Latin American markets, with the time zones and language skills that come with it.
The second matters more for a hiring plan. Florida now has the most employer-friendly restrictive covenant regime in the country.
The covenant advantage, and why fintech should care
The CHOICE Act took effect on 1 July 2025, doubling the permitted non-compete term to four years. It also allows garden leave of up to four years, during which the employee stays paid but need not work after the first 90 days.
The enforcement change is the significant part. Courts must issue a preliminary injunction unless the employee proves by clear and convincing evidence that the agreement is unenforceable. Coverage applies to workers earning more than twice the annual mean wage in the relevant Florida county, which ranges roughly from $80,000 to nearly $150,000.
For a fintech whose value sits in client relationships and proprietary models, that is a material difference from New York. Our state-by-state guide to non-compete enforceability compares the tests across the states you are likely to hire in.
Restrictive covenants are only one layer of protection, and usually not the strongest. Assignment of intellectual property, confidentiality terms and exit procedures do more of the work. Our guide to hiring US talent while safeguarding IP assets covers those terms.
Employment rules in Florida
Florida’s minimum wage is $14.00 per hour, per the US Department of Labor. It rises to $15.00 on 30 September 2026 under the constitutional amendment passed in 2020. Florida levies no state personal income tax, which affects the net figure a candidate compares against a New York offer.
On the hiring market itself, the picture is steadier than the headlines suggest. The Miami metro’s financial activities sector employed 220,900 people in June 2025, up 0.3% year on year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The information sector fell slightly over the same period.
New York, Charlotte and Miami at a glance
| New York | Charlotte | Miami | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best for | Selling to tier-one institutions | Selling into banks at lower cost | Latin America access, strong covenants |
| Tech talent depth | Largest US pool, 394,300 | 28% concentrated in finance sector | Mid-sized, growing |
| Salary pressure | Highest, set by the securities industry | Moderate | Moderate |
| Pay transparency in adverts | Required, 4+ employees | Not required | Not required |
| Non-compete regime | Common law, no statutory ban | State case law | CHOICE Act, up to four years |
| State minimum wage | $17.00 NYC area, $16.00 elsewhere | $7.25 | $14.00, rising to $15.00 in Sept 2026 |
| State income tax | Yes, plus NYC local | Yes | None |
How to test a city before you commit to it
The cheapest way to get this decision wrong is to sign a lease and incorporate before you know whether the pipeline is real.
A better sequence runs in three stages.
First, hire one commercial person in your preferred city through an Employer of Record. That gives you a compliant US employee in roughly the time it takes to agree an offer, without incorporation, state registrations or a payroll provider.
Second, give that hire two or three quarters to test whether buyers in that city respond. If they do not, you have lost one salary rather than an entity, a lease and a year.
Third, revisit the structure once the team reaches a handful of people. The economics change as headcount grows, which is the point covered in our EOR versus own US entity decision guide.
There is also a registration question that catches UK companies out, separate from incorporation. Our guide on when a UK company needs to register in the US covers the triggers.
Your first three hires probably decide this, not your strategy deck
Most UK fintechs we work with make this decision backwards. They pick a city, then work out who to hire there.
The better sequence is to name the first three roles, then ask where those three people actually live. A senior enterprise salesperson selling to Wall Street is not going to relocate to Charlotte. A payments engineer might well already be there.
It is also worth saying that the team does not have to sit in one place. Hiring a salesperson in New York and an engineering lead in Charlotte is common. It is operationally simple with an EOR, rather than opening an entity in each state.
One practical matter that trips up fintechs specifically is banking. Opening a US business bank account as an international founder is slower than most expect, and it is worth starting early. Our guide on how to open a US bank account covers the obstacles.
For a wider view of the US fintech landscape, including San Francisco, Boston and Atlanta, see our guide to US fintech expansion hubs. For the broader UK picture, our guide to expanding to the USA from the UK covers the steps in order.
Talk to us before you commit to a city
We help UK and European fintechs hire in the US without setting up an entity first. We also advise on where the first team should sit.
If you are weighing two or three cities, a short conversation usually narrows it quickly. Get in touch with our team to talk through your options.
Frequently Asked Questions
Get answers to all your questions and take the first step towards a US business expansion.
New York suits companies selling to large financial institutions. Charlotte suits business-to-business fintechs wanting banking depth at lower cost. Miami suits companies targeting Latin America or relying heavily on restrictive covenants to protect client relationships.
No. An Employer of Record can employ your US staff compliantly in any state without you incorporating. Most companies use this route for their first hires, then set up an entity as headcount and commercial activity grow.
Yes. New York State requires employers with four or more employees to include a compensation range in adverts for jobs, promotions and transfers. North Carolina and Florida have no equivalent requirement at state level.
Florida’s CHOICE Act, effective 1 July 2025, permits non-competes of up to four years for workers above a county-based earnings threshold. Courts must grant a preliminary injunction unless the employee meets a high evidential burden.
Only where your activity requires one, and only in states where you have customers. Applications run through NMLS, and the Multistate Money Services Businesses Licensing Agreement can coordinate review when you need more than five states.
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