Software Engineer Salary by City 2026
The average software engineer salary in the US ranges from $124K to $175K depending on city. Irvine leads at $175K/year, with San Francisco at $173K and New York at $152K. Median salary is approximately $125K. Based on Canaria's analysis of 900M+ deduplicated job postings.
Average Software Engineer Salary by City
Top 15 cities by average annual salary (last 6 months, minimum 100 postings)
| City | Avg Annual Salary | Sample Size |
|---|---|---|
| Irvine | $175,364 | 1,239 |
| San Francisco | $172,626 | 1,928 |
| Seattle | $165,837 | 649 |
| Redmond | $157,274 | 574 |
| San Jose | $153,583 | 103 |
| Annapolis Junction | $153,108 | 166 |
| New York | $151,767 | 377 |
| San Diego | $147,824 | 100 |
| Austin | $127,199 | 121 |
| Atlanta | $125,556 | 130 |
| Huntsville | $123,995 | 131 |
Software Engineer Salary Distribution
Distribution of annual salaries across all US software engineer postings (last 6 months)
| Salary Range | Number of Postings |
|---|---|
| $50K | 403 |
| $75K | 1,013 |
| $100K | 1,304 |
| $125K | 2,471 |
| $150K | 4,158 |
| $200K | 804 |
| $250K | 67 |
Software engineer compensation varies dramatically across US metros. The Bay Area, Seattle, and New York continue to offer the highest salaries, driven by the concentration of Big Tech employers and venture-backed startups competing for talent. However, cities like Austin and Atlanta are narrowing the gap as more companies establish engineering offices outside traditional tech hubs.
The salary distribution reveals a right-skewed pattern typical of technical roles: the bulk of postings cluster between $100K and $180K, with a long tail extending past $250K for senior and staff-level positions. The $150K and $180K buckets show notable spikes, likely reflecting common salary bands at large employers.
These salary figures combine both explicitly posted compensation and Canaria's AI-predicted salaries. The prediction model, trained on 50M+ salary observations from Glassdoor and Indeed, achieves a MAPE below 15%, extending salary coverage from roughly 50% to over 85% of postings.
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Frequently Asked Questions
- What is the average software engineer salary in 2026?
- The median software engineer salary across all US postings is approximately $125K/year. However, compensation varies significantly by city, ranging from $124K to $175K in the highest-paying markets.
- Which city pays software engineers the most?
- Irvine currently has the highest average software engineer salary at $175K/year, based on job postings from the last 6 months. San Francisco ($173K) and Seattle also rank among the top-paying cities.
- How does Canaria calculate salary data?
- Canaria extracts salary information from job postings using a combination of structured salary fields and NLP parsing. For postings without explicit salary, Canaria uses an AI prediction model trained on 50M+ Glassdoor and Indeed salary observations, achieving a MAPE (Mean Absolute Percentage Error) below 15%.
- Does this include base salary only or total compensation?
- These figures represent the annual average salary as posted or predicted for the role. They primarily reflect base salary. Total compensation including equity, bonuses, and benefits would be higher, particularly at major tech companies.
Data sourced from publicly available job postings. Updated May 2026. Analysis by Canaria Inc.