Software Quality Assurance Analysts and Testers Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Software Quality Assurance Analysts and Testers worker at that point in the distribution, so $131,870 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 199,800 Software Quality Assurance Analysts and Testers jobs in May 2024, which is 0.13% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in Washington, where the location quotient is 2.01, meaning the occupation holds 2.01 times its national share of local jobs. California employs the most people outright, 31,530 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 31.5% of the national total.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $79,520 at the 25th percentile, $102,610 at the middle, $131,870 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $106,270, a ratio of 2.8 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

Washington posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $128,270, and California the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Software Quality Assurance Analysts and Testers stands number 162 by employment and number 108 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 1% less than its group median, and it supplies 3.8% of the group's 5,192,870 jobs. In 18 of the 49 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $102,610, 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 13,140 jobs, 6.6% of the national total. Employment rank and pay rank are different lists: the second table re-sorts metros with at least 500 jobs in this occupation by mean pay, the floor keeping a handful of workers from posing as a market.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Oklahoma City, OK posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $72,480 a year, against $165,780 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. That is the metro effect in one line: identical job title, materially different pay, decided mostly by which labor market the job sits in.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

Budget arithmetic on the median: $8,551 a month before tax, $3,947 biweekly, $1,973 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($79,520) to the 75th ($131,870) is worth $52,350 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 $112,871 would sit between the median ($102,610) and the 75th percentile ($131,870), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $79,520, is $23,090 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

Pay for the neighboring roles in the same BLS major group: Information Security Analysts, Computer Network Architects, Computer Network Support Specialists, Web and Digital Interface Designers, Computer Programmers, Operations Research Analysts. The full directory is on the Careers hub.