Wall Street firms will pay their New York City employees a record $21.5 billion in bonuses for 2005 after profits at companies including Goldman Sachs Group and Lehman Brothers Holdings reached an all-time high, the state comptroller, Alan Hevesi, said.

Average bonuses for the city’s 174,000 investment bankers and other securities-industry workers will rise 10% to $125,500, also a record, Mr. Hevesi said yesterday in a statement. Total bonuses surpassed the previous peak of $19.5 billion set during the bull market in 2000.

“More money is going to the stars than ever before,” said Michael Kelly, an executive recruiter at Michael Kelly Associates in New York. “The big money is going to the investment bankers and the traders because they’ve had a record year.”

Bankers who help arrange acquisitions, Wall Street’s most profitable business, got the biggest bonuses, which Mr. Kelly said may be as high as $15 million. Compensation rose as earnings at Goldman, Lehman, Morgan Stanley, and Bear Stearns Cos., four of the top five American firms by market value, jumped 15% to $14.6 billion. Trading revenue surged 20% for the year.

Compensation on Wall Street typically consists of base pay of $175,000 to $250,000 for a senior managing director plus bonuses, which are announced in December or January and paid during the following month.

Bankers who stand to gain the most include Jack Levy, 52, and Gene Sykes, 47, co-heads of M &A at Goldman, the world’s biggest merger-advisory firm. Paul Taubman, 45, is their counterpart at no. 2-ranked Morgan Stanley.

Goldman worked on $594 billion of completed mergers and acquisitions in 2005, an increase of 22% from the previous year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Morgan Stanley handled 27% more completed deals.

“M&A bankers and commodities traders will probably do best, but fixed-income and emerging-markets people will also likely do well,” an executive recruiter at Spencer Stuart in New York, Peter Gonye, said. “Many firms did not pay so well in the last couple of years, and now with bigger coffers they’re in a position to make allegiance payments.”

Employment in the securities industry has rebounded since the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index dropped 40% from 2000 through 2002 and 100,000 financial-services workers lost their jobs worldwide. New York City added 8,700 Wall Street jobs in 2005, a 5.3% increase from the previous year, Mr. Hevesi said.

The state will collect $1.5 billion in tax revenue from the bonuses and New York City will get almost $500 million, the comptroller said. According to his estimates, every job created in the local securities industry supports two more jobs in the city and a third in the suburbs.