Top 25 Best-Paying U.S. Cities for Software Engineers (2024)

What are the best-paying cities in America for software engineers? A new study suggests that metro areas in California continue to dominate when it comes to compensation—despite significant technologist migration from Silicon Valley to cities such as Austin and New York.

This study comes from Blind, which surveys (anonymous) technologists on a range of issues. In addition to overall compensation, the full study (which listed 50 cities) also analyzed base salary. For the below excerpt, we’re only listing the top 25 cities and overall compensation, but you can (and should) check out Blind’s website for the more complete breakdown.

What can we conclude from this list? Despite numerous news stories over the past few years about how Silicon Valley is “dying” as a tech hub, and how thousands of technologists are fleeing the West Coast for other metro areas, it’s clear that California cities offer some of the highest possible technologist salaries, suggesting strong technologist demand (and tech-industry activity).

This is largely due to the tech companies headquartered in those cities, of course. Los Gatos is home to Netflix, which is famous for payingextraordinarily high salariesto technologists (provided those technologists provide extraordinary results in return). Menlo Park (Facebook), Cupertino (Apple), and Mountain View (Google) are home-sweet-home to thousands of the nation’s highest-compensated, ultra-specialized technologists, working for the world’s highest-earning, largest tech companies—thus, their dominance of this list.

It's a similar situation in Kirkland and Seattle in Washington state, as well as New York City and Cambridge, MA: All of these cities have well-established tech scenes with insanely-monetized companies willing to pay hefty salaries and stock options to pull in the best talent, ensuring their placement on pretty much any “best-paying” list. In that context, the presence on this list of Boulder, CO, and Los Angeles suggests they’re up-and-coming tech hubs, with rising salaries to match.

While the past two years have witnessed a certain amount of tech-industry migration—for example,Texas has benefitted enormouslyfrom tech companies moving their headquarters and other facilities from California to Austin—California’s tech industry remains robust, at least if we’re looking through the filter of compensation. According toDice’s latest Tech Salary Report, the average technologist salary now stands at $104,566 nationwide.