Computer Programmers Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Computer Programmers worker at that point in the distribution, so $128,960 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

With 109,870 jobs nationally, Computer Programmers make up 0.07% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: California alone holds 14,720 of those jobs, the top three states hold 30.1%, and the deepest concentration sits in Alaska (location quotient 2.28, where 1.00 is the national average). A quotient above 2 usually signals a local industry cluster rather than evenly spread demand.

Pay inside the occupation is wide: $109,900 separates the ends of its ladder. The 90th percentile ($162,090) is 3.1 times the 10th percentile ($52,190), a gap of $109,900 a year. The mean of $103,640 sitting above the median of $98,670 tells you the top end pulls the average up: most workers cluster below the mean, and the high tail is thin.

Pay by state

Sorted by employment, the table below puts California first at 14,720 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, Washington would lead at $158,820. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Computer Programmers stands number 253 by employment and number 133 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% less than its group median, and it supplies 2.1% of the group's 5,192,870 jobs. In 23 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $98,670, 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

New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ is the largest metro employer with 6,510 jobs, 5.9% of the national total. Below, the biggest employers come first; the pay table after it only counts metros with 500 or more jobs in the occupation, so its leader is a real market and not a statistical artifact.

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, $51,180 a year, against $159,130 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. Anyone relocating for this work should price the destination metro's table row, not the national median, before signing anything.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

Budget arithmetic on the median: $8,222 a month before tax, $3,795 biweekly, $1,898 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($71,860) to the 75th ($128,960) is worth $57,100 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. To turn any of these gross figures into spendable money, run them through the paycheck calculator; to weigh an offer against your current role, use the salary calculator; to test a raise against prices, the raise vs inflation calculator.

To place a real offer: a salary of $108,537 would sit between the median ($98,670) and the 75th percentile ($128,960), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $71,860, is $26,810 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

The occupations BLS groups with this one, by size: Computer Network Architects, Computer Network Support Specialists, Web and Digital Interface Designers, Operations Research Analysts, Web Developers, Database Administrators. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.