Computer Occupations, All Other Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Computer Occupations, All Other worker at that point in the distribution, so $147,530 at the 75th percentile means three quarters of the occupation earns less. Figures BLS cannot publish appear as n/p, and its top code prints as $239,200+.

Employment and concentration

BLS counted 439,380 Computer Occupations, All Other jobs in May 2024, which is 0.28% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in District of Columbia, where the location quotient is 8.52, meaning the occupation holds 8.52 times its national share of local jobs. California employs the most people outright, 85,270 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 37.5% of the national total.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $176,800, which is 3.4 times the $52,650 at the 10th, a difference of $124,150 annually. Because the mean wage ($116,700) sits above the median ($108,970), a typical offer should be judged against the median and the 25th to 75th percentile band, not the mean.

Pay by state

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 51 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is Maryland at $141,540; the jobs leader is California:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Computer Occupations, All Other stands number 82 by employment and number 85 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Computer and Mathematical Occupations, the group median wage is $103,790 across 21 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 5% more than its group median, and it supplies 8.5% of the group's 5,192,870 jobs. In 11 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $108,970, which is the single best quick test of whether this occupation's pay is set nationally or locally: a high count means local markets regularly outbid the national figure.

Metropolitan areas: where the jobs and the pay sit

Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV is the largest metro employer with 35,080 jobs, 8.0% of the national total. The first table ranks metros by employment; the second ranks them by mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs in the occupation, because a three-person metro can top a pay table by accident.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, San Juan-Bayamon-Caguas, PR posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $57,040 a year, against $181,720 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. A gap that size between two metro labor markets is why the same occupation title can fund two very different budgets in two different cities.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median annual wage of $108,970 works out to $9,081 a month before taxes, $4,191 per biweekly paycheck, and $2,096 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($76,360) to the 75th ($147,530) is worth $71,170 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. Run the median through the paycheck calculator for a take-home estimate in your state, compare an offer against your current pay with the salary calculator, and check whether a raise actually beats prices with the raise vs inflation calculator.

To place a real offer: a salary of $119,867 would sit between the median ($108,970) and the 75th percentile ($147,530), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $76,360, is $32,610 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Computer and Mathematical Occupations

Sibling occupations in Computer and Mathematical Occupations: Computer Network Architects, Computer Network Support Specialists, Web and Digital Interface Designers, Computer Programmers, Operations Research Analysts, Web Developers. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.