Software Engineer salary in the United States

What's counted. The pay range published in Software Engineer job ads in the United States paying in US dollars (USD), from FindAJobAI's index of job ads on employers' career pages and applicant tracking systems (Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Workday and others) and a few public job boards; no LinkedIn or Indeed data. It is the advertised base salary: not total compensation, bonus, commission or equity, and not what people in the role are actually paid. Only full-time ads and ads that don't state a job type count: internships, traineeships, part-time and contract ads are left out.

Period and sample. Ads posted or last seen between 4 August 2026 and 2 November 2026 (90 days): 3,661 ads from 922 employers. That is every ad in the window with a usable salary, not a sample. Copies of the same ad on several sites count once, and ads in another currency are left out of this page.

How amounts are annualized. Each ad counts once, at the midpoint of its range (or the single figure it gives), as a yearly amount: hourly pay × 2,080 hours, daily × 260, weekly × 52, monthly × 12. A monthly amount stored without its period is recognized by its size for the currency and multiplied by 12; an amount that could be either is dropped.

Outliers. Amounts outside a plausible full-time range are treated as parsing errors and dropped: below $24,000 a year, or above the equivalent of $1,000,000 a year. A range with one implausible end is dropped whole.

Thresholds. A page needs at least 30 ads from 5+ employers, none of them more than a third of the ads. A seniority level, the remote vs on-site split and a metro need 10+ ads; a company needs 3+. Below that, a number is not shown; nothing is estimated or filled in. Seniority comes from the job title: staff, principal, lead, director, head of or VP; senior; junior, entry level or graduate; everything else is mid-level or not stated.

Limitations. Most job ads don't publish pay, and the ones that do lean towards larger companies, technology and places where pay transparency laws apply (several US states require a range in job ads). Our index also leans towards employers that use modern applicant tracking systems. So these figures describe advertised ranges, not every job, and they move a little from day to day.

Updated daily. Data licence: CC BY 4.0, free to use with a link to FindAJobAI.