Software Developers Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

The five rows are five different workers in the same occupation, from the 10th percentile ($79,850) to the 90th ($211,450). BLS suppresses cells that fail its reliability rules (n/p here) and caps the highest wages at $239,200+ a year or $115.00+ an hour; in this ladder that top code appears at the very top rows only.

Employment and concentration

May 2024 employment stood at 1,654,440, or 1.07% of the U.S. total. California leads the state table with 292,630 jobs; the top three states sum to 33.1% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: Washington posts a location quotient of 2.41, so a worker there is far more likely to meet a colleague in this field than the national pattern suggests.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $103,050 at the 25th percentile, $133,080 at the middle, $169,000 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $131,600, a ratio of 2.6 to 1. Where a specific job offer lands on that range says more about the role's level than the occupation's headline median does.

Pay by state

Sorted by employment, the table below puts California first at 292,630 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, California would lead at $170,910. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Software Developers stands number 15 by employment and number 52 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 28% more than its group median, and it supplies 31.9% of the group's 5,192,870 jobs. In 10 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $133,080, 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 119,610 jobs, 7.2% 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, $66,760 a year, against $226,510 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

The median annual wage of $133,080 works out to $11,090 a month before taxes, $5,118 per biweekly paycheck, and $2,559 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($103,050) to the 75th ($169,000) is worth $65,950 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 $146,388 would sit between the median ($133,080) and the 75th percentile ($169,000), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $103,050, is $30,030 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 Support Specialists, Web and Digital Interface Designers, Computer Programmers, Operations Research Analysts, Web Developers, Database Administrators. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.