Even though the United States tech and IT sectors noticed primary layoffs in mid-2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the sectors have recovered many of the misplaced jobs. Even higher, salaries in fact rose by way of three.6% in 2020, in step with Cube.com’s 2021 Tech Wage Document — and can proceed to take action in 2021.
However the wage expansion amassed to simply 52% of tech workers surveyed; 35% noticed flat wages, and the remainder (13%) noticed declines. Those that noticed declines cited a transformation of employer, layoffs, or company-wide wage discounts as the primary reasons — they all results of the pandemic.
Regional wage developments
Salaries each in California’s Silicon Valley and in Boston rose 2.four%, in keeping with the nationwide reasonable. However they exploded in different tech hubs:
- Charlotte, N.C., noticed a 13.eight% upward push in wage to $99,691.
- Orlando noticed a 13.four% upward push to $88,598.
- New York Town noticed a 11.6% upward push to $114,274.
- Austin, Texas, noticed a nine.7% upward push to $104,344.
- Philadelphia noticed a nine.three% upward push to $96,512.
Detroit, Phoenix, Houston, Minneapolis, and metro Baltimore-Washington all noticed wage rises of greater than five%.
Portland, Oregon, noticed a four.6% drop in salaries to $98,026, whilst Seattle noticed a 2.6% decline in salaries to $106,723. Tampa noticed a 11% decline to $87,809, Columbus, OH, a zero.6% decline to $91,483, and Chicago, a zero.1% decline to $94,581.
Cube notes that the survey pattern in Columbus used to be fewer than 100 respondents, so the knowledge isn’t statistically legitimate however integrated for continuity with previous years’ experiences.
Having a look on the survey effects by way of state, Maryland had the best wage expansion: up 13.1% to $109,886, adopted by way of Wisconsin at nine.6% to $97,322 and North Carolina at nine.five% to $97,739. New York, New Jersey, Michigan, Indiana, Florida, Connecticut, Texas, Colorado, and Virginia all had reasonable wage rises of five% or extra.
Washington state noticed the most important drop, of four.four% to $103,995, adopted by way of Missouri of one.eight% to $87,460, Oregon of zero.6% to $97,317, and Illinois of zero.five% to $93,385. No different states had declines. Cube notes that the survey had sufficient statistically important knowledge for 25 states.

Reasonable tech salaries by way of tech hub.
Wage developments by way of profession
The Cube survey presentations that cybersecurity analysts received the perfect wage raises, up 16.three% to $103,106. Cube famous that those less-experienced positions noticed a lot larger wage rises than extremely professional cybersecurity engineers (up four.three% to $134,430), suggesting a scarcity of cybersecurity applicants used to be pushing up wages for junior body of workers.
Tech strengthen engineers got here in 2d, up eight.2% to $68,651, adopted by way of cloud engineers, up 6.three% to $136,479 and industry analysts, up five.three% to $96,633. The survey confirmed that knowledge scientists and devops engineers each noticed wage expansion of greater than 10%, however neither workforce had sufficient respondents to be statistically legitimate.
Occupations that noticed wage declines had been conventional IT roles. Database admins noticed salaries lower by way of four.nine% to $99,038, adopted by way of lend a hand table technicians who had been down four% to $51,553, IT managers who had been down 1.7% to $143,416, and product managers who had been down zero.6% to $12,584. The survey confirmed that mainframe programmer salaries had been down 11.2%, however there weren’t sufficient respondents to be statistically legitimate.
Wage developments by way of talents
Of the 25 talents with perfect reasonable salaries, those who were given the perfect wage will increase had been for the RabbitMQ messaging dealer (up 10.1% to $136,151); Vagrant for virtual-environment control (up eight.five% to $123,615); AI (up 7.2% to $131,907); herbal language processing (up four.eight% to $131,542); and the OmniGraffle diagramming instrument (up four.6% to $124,074).
Of the 25 talents with perfect reasonable salaries, the abilities that noticed the steepest wage declines had been SAP HANA (down 7.1% to $124,918); the Pass language (down 6.1% to $128,001); and Apache Kafka for dispensed messaging (down four.three% to $128,971).
For programmers, the highest 5 salaries had been for folks skilled in TensorFlow, Pass language, Scala, KornShell, and Perl, all of which exceeded $122,000. However apart from for Perl, all the ones languages — and maximum others — noticed a lower in wage in 2020. Of the 25 languages surveyed, simplest 10 confirmed wage rises. The highest languages on the subject of wage expansion had been Tcl (up 7.eight%), Matlab (up 6.2%), Fortran (up five.2%), Perl (three.nine%), and Transact-SQL (up three.four%).
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