Tech Salary Report - June 2026
We analysed 23,660 salary-visible US tech jobs from 3,457 companies posted this month. Top 10 entry-level, top 10 senior IC, medians by role and metro, plus what % of the top 100 highest-paying companies sponsor H-1B.
Two engineers, both posted this week. Anthropic is looking for a Senior Staff Software Engineer at $485K to $625K base. SHI International posted an Associate Vice President role at $275K to $400K. Same month, same job board, same currency. The gap from the floor of one to the ceiling of the other is $350,000.
We monitor career pages at 70,000+ companies. Every month we crawl what they post, classify the roles, and surface what's hiring. This is the first edition of a monthly look at what tech actually pays right now, sourced directly from company-posted ranges rather than self-reported surveys.
We analysed 23,660 salary-visible US tech jobs from 3,457 companies in the last 30 days (May 8, 2026 to June 7, 2026). 79,113 total tech jobs hit our pipeline, but only 30% disclose pay openly. That 30% is the dataset.
The entry-level list reads heavy on finance and trading houses. Chicago Trading Company posts an "Associate C++ Engineer" role at $175K flat (no range), which is the same number Anthropic offers a Junior ML Engineer at the bottom of its band. The conventional wisdom that AI labs out-pay everyone at the entry level is wrong for this month. Trading firms and large banks match or beat them on the floor.
Note also: Walmart at $192K to $384K. The range alone tells you something about how internal levelling works at retail giants. A junior fellow with the right specialty can apparently make twice the floor of the same posting.
Anthropic's Senior Staff Software Engineer post tops the list at $485K to $625K base. Equity not included. The next four roles, all six-figure spreads, sit in the $336K to $400K floor range. Notable: 4 of the top 5 senior IC postings this month are at AI labs (Anthropic, Inflection, Wayve) or at companies whose senior tier is ML-shaped (Roku's Search Assistant, Roblox's GPU compute). The AI labor premium has continued through May 2026.
Median ML engineer pay this month is $150K to $225K. Median software engineer pay is $128K to $199K. That gap, around $22K at the floor and $27K at the ceiling, is what the AI hiring boom looks like in aggregate when you ignore the headline-grabbing Anthropic and OpenAI offers. ML Research roles (15% smaller sample) land at the same floor but a slightly higher ceiling.
Product managers post higher floors than software engineers ($143K vs $128K). This is consistent with previous Levels.fyi snapshots: at the entry-to-mid level, posted PM ranges tend to be wider, and the floor often exceeds the SWE floor because the role has less internal levelling structure to anchor to.
Bay Area peninsula cities dominate the top 10 metros, as expected. The surprise: Richmond, Virginia sits at #3 with a $179K to $225K median. The volume tells the story: 84 postings is a thin sample, but Richmond is where Capital One has been heavily expanding its tech footprint. A single large employer with strong pay bands can shift a metro's median sharply.
San Francisco proper posts a $160K median with the largest sample by far (1,633 postings). Read that as the most reliable city number in this table. Foster City and San Mateo's higher medians come from concentrated Visa, PayPal, and Snowflake postings, plus a long tail of biotech tech roles that skew premium.
Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Google, and Apple are the top 5 hirers by raw post count this month, which is no surprise. The interesting number is Google's median: $160K to $235K, which is the highest median among the top 5 and pretty close to the senior IC pay scale at non-FAANG places. If you're applying to a top-5 hirer this month for pure pay reasons, Google's posted ranges remain the strongest.
For the international student audience: 40 of the 100 highest-paying companies posting tech roles this month have a documented H-1B sponsorship record in the last 3 years. 34 of those have 5 or more approvals (strong sponsors); 6 have between 1 and 4 (occasional sponsors). 60 companies in the top 100 have no recent USCIS record at all.
Put differently: if you filter the top 100 paying companies down to those that actually sponsor, you're left with about 40 viable employers. That's a tighter pipeline than the raw "pay" filter implies, and it's why pre-qualifying employers on sponsorship willingness matters as much for international applicants as the salary number itself.
The surprising finding
The most-shareable number in this report is the ML to SWE gap. Reddit and Hacker News have spent the last 18 months arguing about whether the AI labor premium is real or a survivorship-biased illusion of the highest-paid Anthropic offers. The medians say it's real and durable: across 1,451 ML engineer postings and 6,194 software engineer postings, the floor difference is $22K and the ceiling difference is $27K. That isn't headline-driven; it's the middle of the distribution.
If you're an SWE thinking about the cost of pivoting toward ML, this is the magnitude of the gap. It's not the Anthropic Senior Staff $625K cap, but it's also not zero.
What this means for your search
Three takeaways for active job seekers right now:
- If you're entry-level and want to maximise base, don't ignore finance and trading. Chicago Trading Company, Citadel, Jane Street, and the large banks consistently match top tech on floor pay for new grads with strong engineering signal.
- If you're a senior IC, the AI lab premium is real but concentrated. Expect $300K-plus floors at Anthropic / Inflection / Wayve and similar; don't expect it at the median tier of AI-adjacent companies.
- If you need sponsorship, filter aggressively before applying. 60% of the highest-paying companies this month have no recent H-1B record, and applying without pre-qualification burns weeks.
We'll publish this report on the first Monday of each month. The job board itself is free to browse with no account, so you can search the companies in this report right now. If you want new roles pushed to you, Scoutify real-time alerts start at $5/week: set your filter to your target roles and you'll get notified within minutes when a new role posts at one of the companies above.
How we counted. Scoutify monitors career pages at 70,000+ companies via ATS APIs (Greenhouse, Workday, Lever, SmartRecruiters, Ashby, and others) and spots new postings within minutes. For this report, we restricted to active jobs posted in the last 30 days (May 8, 2026 to June 7, 2026), with a visible USD salary, in roles classified as one of: Software Engineering, Frontend / Mobile / DevOps Engineering, Machine Learning Engineering, AI / LLM Engineering, ML Research, Data Engineering / Science / Analytics, Product Management, Product Design, UX Research, Security Engineering, or Engineering Management. Salaries outside $40K to $800K were excluded as foreign-currency outliers (e.g. yen or rupees mis-tagged as USD). For entry-level and senior IC top-10s, we deduped to one row per company so the list reads as 10 different employers. For city medians we required at least 30 postings per metro. For the H-1B sponsorship analysis we joined the top 100 highest-paying tech employers against our company_visa_sponsorship table, which classifies companies as 'yes' (5+ USCIS approvals), 'conditional' (1-4), or 'no' (0 in the last 3 years). Our coverage skews toward larger companies with formal ATS platforms; startups posting only on LinkedIn or AngelList are not represented.
Methodology and aggregation scripts are open: see github.com/NotifyYouInc/2026-Tech-Salary-Reports. Follow @scoutify for the monthly drop.
Written by
Jules Lemée
Founder of Scoutify
Founder of Scoutify. Has worked as a cloud engineer, software engineer, and ML researcher, while also leading product and go-to-market at startups. Serial tech entrepreneur since age 13, with ventures reaching tens of thousands of users.
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