Software engineer salary by city in 2026

The federal median for this job is $135,980 a year. That is the Bureau of Labor Statistics figure for software developers as of May 2025, published in the Occupational Outlook Handbook. Sorted by metro area, the mean runs from $131,400 in Salt Lake City to $221,710 in San Jose — same survey, same month, a difference of the size people usually put down to seniority rather than geography.

One wrinkle before the numbers. There is no federal occupation called "software engineer". The code is 15-1252, Software Developers, and O*NET lists Software Engineer, Software Development Engineer and Software Architect among the titles employers actually post for it. Everything below is that occupation.

What is the median software engineer salary in 2026?

Software developers, national, May 2025

$135,980Median annual wage

$82,460Lowest 10 percent earned less than

$214,670Highest 10 percent earned more than

1,717,800Software developer jobs in 2025

Median means the middle: half of software developers earned more than $135,980, half earned less. The mean is a different number and a higher one — the May 2025 OEWS national release puts the mean annual wage at $148,100, against a median hourly wage of $65.38. When an average sits that far above the middle, it is because the top of the distribution is very long, not because the typical job pays more than the median says. Use the median.

The distance between the tenth percentile, $82,460, and the ninetieth, $214,670, is the first thing worth absorbing. A Software Engineer posting is not a salary band. It is a label attached to jobs whose pay differs by a factor of more than two and a half before you have chosen a city at all.

Which is why the national median is a starting point and not an answer. Take a Software Engineer with four years of experience at a systems-integration firm in Raleigh: the industry figure below for computer systems design and related services is $132,050, the Raleigh developer mean is $136,640, and the national median is $135,980. Three sources, one narrow band, and the anchor holds. Move the same person to San Jose and the anchor breaks, because the local mean of $221,710 is a different distribution rather than the same distribution shifted a little. Knowing which of those two situations you are in is most of the value in these tables.

Which cities pay software developers the most?

Source: the BLS metropolitan OEWS news releases for each area and the May 2025 national release. "Jobs vs national rate" is the location quotient — how concentrated the occupation is in that area compared with the country as a whole.

How to read this. The last column exists to stop you drawing the wrong conclusion from the fourth. San Jose pays software developers 1.7 times what Salt Lake City pays them, but San Jose pays everyone far above the national average: its all-occupation mean is $57.32 an hour against $33.54 nationally. Austin, Raleigh and Salt Lake City sit between 47 cents and $2.31 above that national all-occupation mean, and their developer wages sit near the national developer figures. The San Jose number is a fact about San Jose, not a fact about software.

The employment column deserves a look of its own. San Jose employs 87,350 software developers at 7.09 times the national concentration, which is a labor market where a Software Engineer can change employer without changing address. Raleigh's 12,580 is a different kind of market at a similar wage — fewer chairs, and a shorter list of firms to apply to when one of them stops hiring.

How much of a city's number is the city?

Divide each metro's software developer mean hourly wage by that metro's mean hourly wage for all occupations, and the four cities stop looking different from one another.

Software developer mean hourly wage as a multiple of the area's all-occupation mean, May 2025

Developer mean hourly wage divided by the area mean hourly wage for all occupations, calculated from the figures printed in each release.

United States		2.1x$71.20 vs $33.54
Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos, TX		1.9x$69.05 vs $35.85
Raleigh-Cary, NC		1.9x$65.69 vs $34.01
San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA		1.9x$106.59 vs $57.32
Salt Lake City-Murray, UT		1.8x$63.17 vs $34.45

The spread across all four metros is a tenth of a point, and the highest-paying metro has the second-lowest ratio on the list. A San Jose developer earns 1.86 times what the average San Jose worker earns; an Austin or Raleigh developer earns 1.93 times the average in their own metro. Every one of the four sits under the national ratio of 2.12, which is what happens when an occupation is concentrated in the places where every other wage is high too. Whatever San Jose is paying for, it is not paying a bigger premium for software than Raleigh is.

What this ratio is not: a cost-of-living adjustment. The all-occupation mean is a wage, not a price level, and OEWS publishes no housing or price component at all. A high local wage floor is correlated with an expensive city; it is not a measurement of one, and this post has no number for what a dollar buys in any of these four places.

Why the city list is only four cities long

BLS retired the static per-metro wage pages that used to make this table trivial; area estimates now live in an interactive data tool, and each regional news release details one occupational group. Only the metros whose May 2025 release featured computer and mathematical occupations print a software developer line at all.

Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue is the clearest casualty. Its release records computer and mathematical occupations at 9.3 percent of area employment with a mean hourly wage of $72.96, then details business and financial occupations instead. So this post has no Seattle developer figure, and that absence says nothing whatever about Seattle pay.

The workable substitute is the group. Computer and mathematical occupations is the family that contains software developers along with analysts, administrators and research scientists, and every metro release publishes its mean hourly wage. It runs high relative to the occupation because it also contains lower-paying support roles, so treat it as a ranking device rather than a salary estimate.

Source: the BLS metropolitan OEWS news release for each area, May 2025. These are group means across all computer and mathematical occupations, not software developer wages.

Read down that first column and the same shape appears as in the developer table: one metro far out in front, then a cluster. San Diego belongs in the same conversation — its May 2025 release puts computer and mathematical occupations at 3.8 percent of area employment with a mean of $64.44 an hour, against an area all-occupation mean of $38.01 — and the pattern holds there too. What none of these group figures can tell you is where a Software Engineer sits inside the group, which is exactly the number a candidate wants and the one the release does not print.

Does the industry pay more than the city?

Median annual wage for software developers by industry, May 2025

The five industries BLS publishes separately. The spread across all five is narrower than the gap between San Jose and the national mean.

Software publishers		$164,550
Manufacturing		$136,330
Management of companies and enterprises		$135,680
Finance and insurance		$135,460
Computer systems design and related services		$132,050

Industry moves the median less than people expect. The published range runs from $132,050 in computer systems design and related services to $164,550 at software publishers, and four of those five industries land within a few thousand dollars of the national median of $135,980. Only software publishing pulls clear.

Here is the position I would defend: for most people, the percentile matters more than the zip code. The gap between the tenth and ninetieth percentiles of this single occupation, $82,460 to $214,670, is wider than the gap between any two industries on that chart, and wider than the gap between the national mean and every metro in the table except San Jose. A Software Engineer moving from a systems-design consultancy in Raleigh to a software publisher in Raleigh is moving along the axis that pays. A Software Engineer taking the same level of job in a more expensive city has mostly bought a more expensive city.

That argument has a limit, and it should be named rather than buried. BLS does not publish these wages by years of experience, so nothing here tells you what a senior title is worth against a mid-level one at the same employer. The percentile spread contains seniority, industry, firm size and city mixed together, and the data cannot pull them apart.

Is "software engineer" even the job you are applying to?

Titles in this field drift, and the drift matters the moment you compare a posting against a wage table. O*NET's sample of reported job titles for 15-1252.00 is the reference worth keeping, because it is drawn from what employers write rather than from what a taxonomy would prefer:

Application Developer · Application Integration Engineer · Developer · DevOps Engineer · Infrastructure Engineer · Software Architect · Software Developer · Software Development Engineer · Software Engineer · Systems Engineer

If the posting in front of you carries any of those, the $135,980 median is the figure that applies to it. One title looks close and is not: Software Quality Assurance Analysts and Testers is a separate occupation, 15-1253, with a median of $104,300, a tenth percentile of $61,440 and a ninetieth of $167,010. A "Software Engineer in Test" role can be counted there instead, which is reason enough to read the responsibilities before anchoring on a number.

O*NET places Software Developers in Job Zone Four, considerable preparation needed, and BLS gives the typical entry-level education as a bachelor's degree. Typical is not the same as required. Software developers alone employed 1,717,800 people in 2025, and BLS projects 174,700 more of those jobs by 2035. The headline 10 percent growth rate and the roughly 106,100 openings a year are published for the wider group of 1,905,400 — developers plus quality assurance analysts and testers — with the openings figure counting replacements as well as new posts. A field opening that many roles annually is not screening every one of them the same way.

What the wage figure leaves out

More than most readers assume, and this is the paragraph to carry into a negotiation. OEWS defines wages as straight-time gross pay, exclusive of premium pay. Included: base rates, commissions, incentive pay, production bonuses, hazard pay. Excluded, by name: stock bonuses, year-end bonuses, profit-sharing payments, overtime pay, on-call pay, severance and relocation allowances.

For a Software Engineer at a public company, that exclusion list is the entire equity component of an offer. The $221,710 San Jose mean is a wage figure and not a total-compensation figure, and the two are furthest apart precisely in the places and at the companies where the wage figure is highest.

Two further caveats, on timing and on scope. The May 2025 estimates blend survey responses collected across six reference periods reaching back to November 2022, so they trail the market rather than describe this month. And OEWS covers workers paid a wage or salary; the self-employed are excluded, which means contract and independent developers appear nowhere in any number above.

If you are applying for this role

Search the title variants, not the title. A search for Software Engineer alone misses Software Development Engineer, Application Developer and the DevOps Engineer postings that O*NET maps to the same occupation — frequently the same job under a different employer's naming convention.

Expect a base range rather than a point. Outside San Jose, the four metros here cluster between $131,400 and $143,630 as means, with the national median at $135,980, so a base offer in that band is ordinary rather than low. A number below the $82,460 tenth percentile is worth a direct question about what level the role is scoped at.

That range is also what belongs in the desired-salary box on the application form, where a single number is a guess and a band is a position. Put the metro mean nearest your city at the top of it and the national median at the bottom, and you have written something you can defend from a public table rather than from a feeling.

Ask one thing early: what is base and what is variable? Because the federal data excludes stock and year-end bonuses outright, an employer's total-compensation number and the BLS wage figure are measuring different quantities, and two offers cannot be compared until you know which one you are being quoted.

Once the range is settled and the title variants are listed, the tedious part is retyping the same history into every form. HeroApply fills the application from your resume, so the search stays about which postings are worth your time.