Byline: Meredith Cole, business journalist covering regional banks, compensation, and workforce filings for 12 years
Last reviewed: June 28, 2026
FirstMerchants is best understood as First Merchants Corporation and First Merchants Bank, a regional banking employer whose 2025 Form 10-K reported 2,086 full-time equivalent employees. The job story is shaped by three forces: BLS May 2024 teller median pay of $39,340, First Merchants’ 18 percent turnover rate in 2025, and 2026 acquisition costs that included employee retention bonuses and severance.
That is a different picture from a plain salary article. FirstMerchants jobs sit inside a regional-bank cycle where branches, loans, deposits, rates, acquisitions, and local labor markets all affect work.
What FirstMerchants is in the employment market
First Merchants Corporation is a public financial holding company behind First Merchants Bank. The company’s investor profile describes it as the largest financial holding company based in Central Indiana, with more than 111 banking center locations in Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio, a wealth management company, and $21.1 billion in total assets as of March 31, 2026.
That makes FirstMerchants a regional-bank employer, not a national megabank and not a small community bank. Its workforce includes branch employees, personal bankers, loan officers, credit analysts, commercial bankers, treasury staff, wealth employees, operations teams, compliance workers, risk staff, technology employees, and managers.
The role mix matters more than the logo.
A teller-style role, a credit role, and a treasury role are all bank jobs, but they do not carry the same wage ceiling, career risk, or labor-market outlook. A useful FirstMerchants article has to split those lanes instead of treating “bank employee” as one category.
The regional-bank cycle changes the job picture
Regional banks are tied to local economies, interest rates, credit demand, deposit competition, branch networks, and acquisition activity. Those pressures affect jobs in different ways.
When loan demand is strong, lending and credit teams can become more important. When deposits are expensive or competition rises, branch and treasury relationships matter. When digital banking shifts customer behavior, routine teller work faces pressure. When a bank completes an acquisition, duplicate roles, retention payments, severance, system conversions, and new market coverage can all appear at once.
First Merchants’ 2026 results show that dynamic. The company’s first-quarter 2026 release reported $17.0 million of acquisition costs, primarily employee retention bonuses and severance, contract termination charges, and professional fees. Those are not ordinary wages. They are transition costs tied to corporate activity.
This is the first analytical point: FirstMerchants jobs should be judged through business-cycle exposure, not just posted title. A job in routine transactions carries different risk than a job in credit, treasury, risk, wealth, or technology.
Branch jobs: visible, useful, but pressured
BLS May 2024 data reported a median annual wage of $39,340 for tellers. BLS also projected teller employment to decline 13 percent from 2024 to 2034.
That is the clearest warning sign for branch transaction work. It does not mean every branch job disappears. It does mean routine teller-style work sits in a weaker occupational category than lending, analysis, or management.
For FirstMerchants, this affects entry-level branch roles most directly. These jobs can teach customer service, cash handling, account basics, compliance habits, and local banking operations. They can also be exposed to digital substitution, branch efficiency, and local wage competition from credit unions, larger banks, insurance offices, call centers, retail management, and administrative employers.
Not all branch work is equal. A branch employee who moves into relationship banking, small-business banking, referrals, lending support, or management is in a different lane from someone staying in routine transactions.
Financial clerk and account-support roles sit in the middle
BLS May 2024 data reported a $48,650 median annual wage for financial clerks. BLS projected overall employment of financial clerks to decline 5 percent from 2024 to 2034, while still expecting many openings because workers leave occupations or the labor force.
That benchmark is useful for account-support, new-account, loan-interview, loan-processing, and operations-adjacent work. It sits above teller pay, but it is still part of a pressured clerical category.
The difference is about $9,310 at the median between BLS teller and financial clerk data. That is meaningful, but it is not the same jump as moving into lending, credit, treasury, wealth, or management.
Small step. Real limit.
The practical read is that account-support work can be a bridge. It may help employees learn banking documents, account rules, customer workflows, and compliance routines. But public labor data does not support treating clerical banking work as the strongest long-term earnings track.
Lending and credit carry better upside
Loan officers and credit staff sit closer to the higher-value side of regional banking. BLS May 2024 data reported a $74,180 median annual wage for loan officers and projected loan officer employment to grow 2 percent from 2024 to 2034.
The wage gap is large. The BLS loan officer median is $34,840 above the teller median and $25,530 above the financial clerk median.
That difference reflects job content. Lending and credit roles involve borrower evaluation, credit judgment, documentation, relationship management, production goals, compliance, collateral analysis, market knowledge, and risk awareness. Those duties are harder to replace than routine transaction processing.
This is the second analytical point: inside FirstMerchants, the stronger economics are likely tied to judgment-heavy work. Lending, credit, treasury, wealth, risk, technology, and management have more durable labor-market signals than branch transaction work.
The caveat is important. Loan and credit roles can also be more exposed to interest rates, loan demand, credit quality, and performance goals. Higher upside does not mean lower pressure.
Workforce scale: 2,086 FTE employees
The First Merchants Corporation 2025 Annual Report on Form 10-K reported 2,086 full-time equivalent employees as of December 31, 2025. That number puts the company in a structured regional-bank category.
A workforce of that size can support formal training, benefits administration, succession planning, employee surveys, compliance learning, and internal talent review. It also means employee experience can vary by department. A branch service associate, headquarters risk employee, credit analyst, treasury worker, and wealth employee may all work for the same company but experience different schedules, incentives, managers, and career ceilings.
The 2025 Form 10-K also reported that more than 1,500 employees participated in the company’s annual calibration process, a 9-box talent assessment used for succession and career planning. It reported 99.7 percent required-training completion and more than 55 employees participating in education assistance in 2025.
Those are signs of a formal people system. They are not proof that promotion is fast or automatic.
Turnover and engagement tell a mixed story
First Merchants reported an 18 percent turnover rate in 2025. The same filing said 65 percent of employees were considered “highly engaged” in the biennial Employee Engagement Survey, with an 85 percent response rate.
Those two facts can coexist. A company can have a majority of employees scoring as highly engaged and still face turnover in branch, service, clerical, or acquisition-affected roles. It can also have strong pockets of retention in lending, credit, wealth, technology, or management while lower-wage roles churn more often.
The public filing does not break turnover down by voluntary exits, involuntary exits, state, branch, department, tenure, or job family. That missing breakdown matters. A single 18 percent number may hide very different retention patterns.
The measured conclusion is narrower: FirstMerchants had formal engagement tracking and still had meaningful workforce movement in 2025.
Acquisition costs add labor noise
First Merchants’ first-quarter 2026 earnings release reported net income available to common stockholders of $27.7 million, compared with $54.9 million in the first quarter of 2025. The company said current-quarter results included $17.0 million of acquisition costs, primarily employee retention bonuses and severance, contract termination charges, and professional fees.
Retention bonuses and severance belong in a labor article because they show what happens when a bank is integrating a deal. Selected employees may be paid to stay through transition. Other roles may be cut, consolidated, or moved. Systems, branches, leadership, and reporting lines can change.
Do not read that $17.0 million as normal payroll. It is a deal-related cost category.
For workers, the acquisition period can create both opportunity and uncertainty. New markets and teams may expand the bank. Duplicate functions may shrink. Key employees may be retained. Some employees may exit with severance. Public filings show the cost, not the individual path.
Pay-ratio data: useful, but not a wage scale
The First Merchants Corporation 2026 Proxy Statement reported CEO total compensation, median employee compensation, and the CEO-to-median-employee pay ratio under SEC rules. The proxy said the company reviewed an employee population of 2,011 employees after excluding the CEO.
That disclosure is useful for company-level compensation context. It is not a salary table.
A proxy median employee figure can include compensation elements beyond base pay and is calculated under a required methodology. It does not tell what a teller, service associate, personal banker, credit analyst, loan officer, or branch manager earns.
The right use is comparison, not substitution. BLS provides occupational medians. Glassdoor-style salary pages provide self-reported company role estimates. SEC proxy data provides company-wide pay-ratio disclosure. The sources answer different questions.
Benefits as part of the risk-adjusted picture
First Merchants’ public benefits materials list a Retirement Income & Savings Plan 401(k), Employee Stock Purchase Plan, educational assistance, health insurance, prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, wellness program, health savings account, flexible spending accounts, life insurance, disability coverage, PTO, holidays, bereavement, accident insurance, and critical care insurance.
The harder retirement number comes from plan materials: the employer match can reach up to 4.5 percent of eligible compensation, based on 100 percent of the first 3 percent of employee contributions and 50 percent of contributions above 3 percent and below 6 percent.
That formula changes in dollar value by role. At the BLS teller median of $39,340, a 4.5 percent match equals about $1,770 if an eligible employee contributes enough to receive the full match. At the BLS loan officer median of $74,180, it equals about $3,338.
The same percentage is worth more when pay is higher.
That is why benefits should not be discussed separately from role level. A package can look identical on paper but feel different to a lower-paid service employee and a higher-paid lending employee.
| Data point | Named source | Figure |
|---|---|---|
| First Merchants assets | Investor profile, March 31, 2026 | $21.1 billion |
| Banking center locations | Investor profile, March 31, 2026 | More than 111 |
| Workforce size | 2025 Form 10-K | 2,086 FTE employees |
| Turnover rate | 2025 Form 10-K | 18 percent |
| Highly engaged employees | 2025 Form 10-K | 65 percent |
| Teller median wage | BLS May 2024 | $39,340 |
| Financial clerk median wage | BLS May 2024 | $48,650 |
| Q1 2026 acquisition costs | Q1 2026 results | $17.0 million |
Where the headline job story misleads
The easiest mistake is to ask whether FirstMerchants is a “good employer” as one broad yes-or-no question. Public data does not support that simplicity.
The better question is which FirstMerchants role is being discussed. Branch transaction roles face weaker BLS outlook and lower median pay. Account-support roles sit higher but remain clerical. Lending and credit roles carry stronger pay signals but more business-cycle exposure. Treasury, wealth, risk, technology, and management roles may offer stronger economics but require more specialized skill.
A second mistake is treating acquisition costs as a warning sign or a benefit by themselves. Retention bonuses and severance are transition tools. They can protect some workers and displace others.
A third mistake is treating engagement as a universal employee experience. A 65 percent highly engaged figure is company-defined and company-wide. It does not tell what every team or manager is like.
Data limits
BLS reports national occupational data, not FirstMerchants payroll. SEC filings give official company-level disclosures, but they do not publish wage bands by role, turnover by department, or engagement by state. Public benefits pages list categories but usually omit premiums, deductibles, PTO accrual, eligibility timing, and detailed plan rules. Earnings releases report acquisition costs but not individual employee outcomes.
Data reflects BLS May 2024 wage and outlook data, First Merchants 2025 workforce reporting, and 2026 investor and earnings disclosures. Local hiring conditions, interest rates, acquisition integration, branch staffing, and internal compensation changes may shift the picture.
FAQ
What is FirstMerchants?
FirstMerchants usually refers to First Merchants Corporation and First Merchants Bank, a regional banking company based in Central Indiana with operations across Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio.
How many employees does FirstMerchants have?
The First Merchants Corporation 2025 Form 10-K reported 2,086 full-time equivalent employees as of December 31, 2025.
What does BLS say about teller pay?
BLS May 2024 data reported a $39,340 median annual wage for tellers and projected teller employment to decline 13 percent from 2024 to 2034.
What does BLS say about financial clerk pay?
BLS May 2024 data reported a $48,650 median annual wage for financial clerks and projected employment to decline 5 percent from 2024 to 2034.
Why are lending and credit roles different?
Lending and credit roles involve judgment, relationships, documentation, risk, and production. BLS May 2024 data reported a $74,180 median annual wage for loan officers, far above the teller median.
What does First Merchants turnover show?
First Merchants reported 18 percent turnover in 2025. The public filing does not show whether turnover was concentrated in branch, support, lending, corporate, or acquisition-related roles.
What did acquisition costs include in 2026?
First Merchants’ first-quarter 2026 release said $17.0 million of acquisition costs primarily included employee retention bonuses and severance, contract termination charges, and professional fees.
What is the practical job takeaway?
FirstMerchants looks like a structured regional-bank employer with formal training, engagement tracking, benefits, turnover, and acquisition-related labor movement. The stronger role economics appear outside routine transaction work, especially in lending, credit, treasury, wealth, risk, technology, and management.