Average take-home pay for Goldman's 32,500 permanent and temporary employees is a mere $500,000 for their performance in 2009.

Which may sound a lot - and it is a lot - but it is a lot less than it would have paid had it followed its normal remuneration procedures.

Believe it or not, if it had followed past form and paid out 50% of net revenues to staff - which is its ceiling for what employees can pocket - pay per head would have been over $700,000.

So what's gone wrong (or right - depending on your perspective on bankers and their pay)?

Well a number of things, one of which is Alistair Darling's special one-off bonus tax.

This has led to a bit of a reduction in bonuses for senior UK based staff.

That said, Goldman's top bods tell me they still expect to pay the British taxman "several hundred million pounds" - perhaps half a billion pounds - as its share of Darling's bonus levy.

Which implies that just those bonuses paid in the UK by Goldman (in addition to salaries and benefits) will be in the region of £1bn in aggregate.

Not too shoddy.

And it means that a fair number of London based execs will be banking many millions of pounds each.

That said, Goldman execs tell me they are trying to respond to the public mood and are therefore exercising some restraint over what all their top people are paid throughout the world.

It has chosen to allocate just 35.8% of its net revenues to compensation and benefits, the lowest proportion since it became a public company just over ten years ago.

And it points out that in 2009 it has contributed more than $1bn to charitable causes and financial support for small businesses.

Even so, as a proportion of revenues, JP Morgan appears to have paid out a bit less than Goldman (and Morgan Stanley paid out miles more as a proportion, though massively less in absolute terms).

Goldman's remuneration pot of $16.2bn is still a handsome 49% more than it paid out in 2008.

How so? Well it's boom time for investment banks and for this one - the world's most successful - in particular: net revenues in 2009 were up more than 100% at $45.2bn, and pre tax earnings increased by a factor of almost nine to $19.8bn.

Here's the thing: in the autumn of 2008, all big banks were just hours from meltdown; and here is Goldman, a year later, generating a fraction less than its all-time record 2007 revenues.

It's a funny old world.

UPDATE 15:55

Goldman is keen to point out that JP Morgan employs a different methodology when comparing remuneration to revenues. And it says that if it used the same approach (with admin workers excluded) its ratio would be similar or lower to Morgan's.