Web Developers Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

A percentile marks a point in this occupation's pay distribution: the worker one quarter of the way up the Web Developers ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $63,140. BLS top-codes very high wages ($239,200+ a year, $115.00+ an hour) and marks estimates it cannot publish as n/p.

Employment and concentration

With 78,860 jobs nationally, Web Developers make up 0.05% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: California alone holds 10,820 of those jobs, the top three states hold 28.5%, and the deepest concentration sits in Washington (location quotient 2.42, 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: $114,310 separates the ends of its ladder. The 90th percentile ($162,870) is 3.4 times the 10th percentile ($48,560), a gap of $114,310 a year. The mean of $98,790 sitting above the median of $90,930 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 10,820 jobs; sorted by median pay instead, District of Columbia would lead at $121,000. Both orderings are printed in one table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Web Developers stands number 308 by employment and number 162 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 12% less than its group median, and it supplies 1.5% 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 $90,930, 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 6,560 jobs, 8.3% 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, New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $84,170 a year, against $160,060 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

As a household number, $90,930 a year is $7,578 a month gross, $3,497 every two weeks, $1,749 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($63,140) to the 75th ($124,300) is worth $61,160 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. The next step from a gross figure is a net one: run the $7,578 monthly figure through the paycheck calculator applies your state's taxes, the salary calculator compares two offers in any unit, and the raise vs inflation calculator tells you whether a nominal raise is a real one.

To place a real offer: a salary of $100,023 would sit between the median ($90,930) and the 75th percentile ($124,300), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $63,140, is $27,790 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: Web and Digital Interface Designers, Computer Programmers, Operations Research Analysts, Database Administrators, Database Architects, Computer and Information Research Scientists. Every one of the 826 published occupations is indexed on the Careers hub.