Software Engineer Salaries by U.S. City — May 2026
Where the highest-paid software engineering roles are actually being posted right now. We analyzed listings with disclosed salary ranges from our database and broke them down by city. The top seven below.
The data
We pulled every active U.S. listing in the TBJB database tagged as engineering by our taxonomy, with a publisher-disclosed salary range, as of May 23, 2026. Cities with fewer than 30 such listings were excluded for statistical noise reasons. Outliers above $800K max were dropped to avoid skew from executive-track openings.
| City | Listings | Avg min | Avg max | Midpoint |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mountain View, CA | 30 | $117K | $159K | $138K |
| Sunnyvale, CA | 83 | $109K | $147K | $128K |
| Austin, TX | 30 | $107K | $141K | $124K |
| New York, NY | 34 | $99K | $132K | $115K |
| San Jose, CA | 63 | $97K | $131K | $114K |
| Livermore, CA | 40 | $88K | $121K | $104K |
| New York City, NY | 85 | $84K | $110K | $97K |
What this tells us
- Mountain View remains the highest-paying U.S. city for software engineering, at a $138K midpoint. Sunnyvale and Austin follow. The Bay Area continues to dominate even amid post-pandemic geographic redistribution.
- Austin closes the gap — at a $124K midpoint, Austin is now within ~10% of Mountain View's posted ranges, confirming what tech recruiters have been saying for two years: it's no longer a "discount" market for top engineering talent.
- New York has a notable split — listings tagged "New York" vs "New York City" have meaningfully different midpoints ($115K vs $97K). This likely reflects different employer cohorts: the "New York" tag skews to financial-services and large enterprises, while "New York City" captures more retail and mid-market roles.
- Livermore is the surprise — driven primarily by Lawrence Livermore National Lab and adjacent defense contractors. $104K midpoint is impressive for the area and reflects the specialized nature of the work being posted.
Caveats
Sample sizes per city are small (30-85 listings). These reflect openings on the day of the snapshot, not yearly hiring volume. We analyzed only listings with publisher-disclosed salaries, which per our broader transparency report is only 2.4% of total U.S. listings. Cities with stronger transparency-law enforcement (California, New York) are over-represented in this sample. Cities with weaker transparency requirements (Texas being a recent addition) may be undercounted here even when employer hiring is robust.
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Engineering jobs $150K+Methodology
Data captured from The Best Job Board's database on May 23, 2026. Filters applied: active (archived_at IS NULL), U.S. (is_us = true), function = engineering (TBJB taxonomy), publisher-disclosed salary_min and salary_max (excludes inferred/imputed), salary_max < $800K (excludes executive outliers), location grouped by first comma-delimited token. Minimum 30 listings per city. Press inquiries: contact via the site.