Career marketplace Hired is out with its annual State of Salaries report for the tech industry, and among leading hubs, Seattle showed the most modest increase in pay at just 3 percent. But the region’s $142,000 average salary is still good enough for third highest behind only San Francisco and New York.
Average pay in the Bay Area is $155,000, up 7 percent from 2019. Austin and Toronto led the tech world with 10 percent gains and the U.S. market average is $146,000 per year.
The average salary in Seattle would be $188,000 a year if adjusted for San Francisco’s cost of living, third behind Denver ($202,000) and Austin ($224,000).
The numbers come at an interesting time for companies and workers who have been coping with the coronavirus pandemic, economic fallout from the crisis and the new dynamic of remote work.
Hired noted Tuesday that it’s too early to tell whether the 2020 tech salary trendline will stay steady or forever be divided into “before” and “after” COVID-19.
The analysis analyzed salaries for software engineers, product managers, DevOps engineers, designers, and data scientists. It focused heavily on remote work and whether that option should affect pay and how much it would drive workers to consider moving to a city with a lower cost of living.
Here are some highlights:
- Nearly one third of tech talent would be willing to accept a reduced salary if their employer made work from home permanent, Hired said. Over half (55 percent) would not.
- Half of tech talent want to return to their office “at least once a week” post-COVID, but only 7 percent report wanting to work there every day.
- Ninety percent of tech talent believe the same job should receive the same pay, regardless of remote work, but, when factoring in cost of living, 40 percent say they support location adjustments.
- More than half (53 percent) of tech workers said permanent work from home would make them “likely” or “very likely” to move to a city with a lower cost of living.
- Tech talent is split on job security, with 42 percent concerned, and 58 percent not concerned, that they are going to be laid off in the next 6 months.
- Seattle trailed only New York on a list of cities that tech workers would consider moving to if they decided to make a change. San Francisco, Austin and Los Angeles rounded out the top five.
