The 2026 Tech Salary Report: What Engineers, Designers and Data People Earn

Every year we pull the salary bands from roles posted on HireWise, combine them with offer data that candidates share with us, and publish the medians. The 2026 edition covers 41,800 postings and 6,350 accepted offers collected between January 1 and May 31, 2026. It is not a perfect picture of the market, but it is a large and recent one, and it comes from real listings rather than self-reported surveys alone.

This report focuses on three role families: software engineering, product design and data (data science, analytics and data engineering). If you want to compare against live listings while you read, you can filter current jobs by salary or jump straight to engineering roles.

How we built the numbers

All figures are median annual base salary for a mid-level individual contributor, roughly three to six years of experience. They exclude equity, bonuses, sign-on payments and benefits. Where a posting gave a range, we used the midpoint. Where it gave only a minimum, we dropped it, which removed about 8.2% of the sample.

Currencies are kept local on purpose. Converting everything to US dollars makes Berlin look cheap and San Francisco look absurd, and neither impression helps someone deciding whether to take an offer in their own city. For cross-border comparisons, use a conversion rate from the date you are actually negotiating, not the one in this article.

What counts as each role

• Software engineer: backend, frontend, full-stack and mobile, excluding staff-level and management titles
• Product designer: product, UX and interaction designers
  • Brand and marketing designers are excluded
  • Design engineers are counted as engineers when the title includes “engineer”
• Data: three subgroups, merged for the city table
  1. Data scientists and machine learning practitioners
  2. Analytics engineers and senior analysts
  3. Data engineers and platform roles

The city-by-city table

These are the medians for mid-level roles in each city. The final column shows the change in the software engineering median compared with the same period in 2025.

City	Software engineer	Product designer	Data scientist	Engineering change vs 2025
San Francisco	$186,000	$162,500	$178,000	+3.1%
New York	$172,000	$148,000	$165,500	+4.4%
London	£82,000	£68,500	£76,000	+2.6%
Berlin	€78,500	€66,000	€74,000	+5.2%
Amsterdam	€76,000	€64,500	€72,500	+4.8%
Toronto	CA$138,000	CA$112,000	CA$131,000	+1.9%
Sydney	A$168,000	A$142,000	A$160,000	+3.7%

A few things stand out. Berlin and Amsterdam saw the biggest jumps, driven mostly by a handful of well-funded companies that stopped offering “Berlin rates” and moved to a single European band. Toronto was the slowest-growing market in the sample, at 1.9%, which fits the cautious picture painted in our global economic outlook.

Engineers: the gap between levels is widening

Across all seven cities, the jump from mid-level to senior grew faster than the base median itself. In San Francisco, the senior median reached $221,000, a gap of $35,000 over mid-level. In London, senior engineers landed at £101,000, nearly £19,000 more than their mid-level colleagues.

That gap matters for negotiation. If you are at the top of a mid-level band, it is often worth asking directly whether the role could be levelled as senior. Companies are more flexible on title than on base pay, and the title then sets your next raise.

“We stopped negotiating base salary line by line. Every role has a published band, and the conversation is about which level fits, not about squeezing an extra four thousand. Offers close faster and nobody feels cheated six months later.”

Daniel Okafor, VP of Engineering at Brightwater Health

Remote roles and location pay

About 31% of postings in the sample were fully remote. Of those, 64% used some form of location-based pay, usually three or four geographic tiers. The remaining 36% paid one global rate, almost always pegged to a US or Western European band. Companies with a global rate tended to be smaller: the median headcount was 85, against 420 for companies using tiers.

If you are comparing remote offers, ask which tier applies and when it was last reviewed. Some companies update their tiers only once a year, on dates such as 2026-01-15, which means a move between cities mid-year might not change your pay until the following January.

Designers: steady, but fewer junior roles

Product design salaries rose more slowly than engineering pay in every city except Sydney, where demand from fintech and government digital services pushed the median to A$142,000. The bigger story is the shrinking share of junior roles. Only 9.5% of design postings in our sample were open to candidates with under two years of experience, compared with 14% in 2024.

Designers with front-end skills earned a clear premium. Postings that asked for working knowledge of HTML, CSS and a component library paid a median of €71,000 in Berlin, roughly €5,000 above the general design median there. You can see examples on the Figma company page and in similar listings across the board.

Data roles: the analytics engineer moment

Data science medians grew modestly, but analytics engineers had the strongest year of any group we track. In New York the analytics engineering median rose 7.8% to $158,000, and in London it reached £72,000. Hiring managers told us they now want people who can model data cleanly in SQL and own a pipeline end to end, rather than specialists who hand a notebook to someone else.

If you work in data and want to reproduce our city comparisons with your own offer, here is the small script our analysts used to compute medians from a CSV export. It assumes one row per posting with a city, role and salary_mid column.

import pandas as pd

postings = pd.read_csv("hirewise_postings_2026h1.csv")

mid_level = postings[
    (postings["level"] == "mid")
    & (postings["salary_mid"].notna())
]

medians = (
    mid_level
    .groupby(["city", "role"])["salary_mid"]
    .median()
    .unstack("role")
    .round(-2)
)

print(medians.to_string())

What the numbers do not show

Base salary is only one part of total compensation, and in some cities it is the smaller part. In San Francisco, the median annual equity grant for a mid-level engineer at a late-stage company was worth about $48,000 on paper. In Berlin or Amsterdam, equity is less common, but employers typically contribute more to pensions, and statutory holiday allowances of 25 to 30 days are standard.

Other things to weigh when comparing offers:

• Bonus structure, and whether it has actually paid out in the last two years
• Pension or 401(k) matching, often between 3% and 8% of base
• Working hours and on-call expectations
  • A role with weekly on-call from 18:00 to 08:00 local time is not the same job as one without it
  • Ask whether on-call is paid separately, and at what rate
• Cost of living, which a simple salary table cannot capture

For official cost-of-living and wage data, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and the UK government’s earnings statistics are good starting points.

How to use this report in a negotiation

Bring one or two data points, not a spreadsheet. A sentence like “the median for this role in Amsterdam is around €76,000 according to recent posting data” is easier to discuss than a table of percentiles. Then let the recruiter respond. Most will tell you where the band sits if you ask politely and early, ideally before the final interview rather than after the offer letter arrives.

If a company will not share a range at all, that is useful information too. In our data, postings without a salary range took a median of 41 days to fill, compared with 29 days for those that included one.

We will publish the second-half update on October 15, 2026, at 10:00 a.m. ET (15:00 BST), with figures through August. Until then, the best way to see current numbers is to browse open roles and look at the bands companies are posting today. Employers who want to appear in next year’s report can post a job with a salary range; the salary field is available on every plan.