Whether it’s time to ask for a raise yourself or to check your team members’ pay against the market, having reliable and timely salary data at your fingertips proves key. That’s especially true in today’s cutthroat environment where competition for many IT skills and leadership competencies is only expected to heighten.
[ Want more IT salary advice? Read our related articles: How to show you deserve a raise: 6 tips and 10 IT salary negotiation do's and don'ts. ]
While perks have their place, when it’s time to talk pay, the following online salary surveys are some of the best places to start.
1. Robert Half 2019 Technology & IT Salary Guide
Robert Half’s forward-looking report contains a variety of valuable insight, including the most hard-to-fill roles (business intelligence analysts, cloud architects and engineers, and data scientists in the coming year) and most in-demand tech skills. But salary tables are the meat of this annual guide. Robert Half offers a percentile-based look at pay for each position, from CIO to web developer, as well as a customer salary calculator that can factor in local variances provided.
2. Foote Partners’ 2018 IT Salary and Skills Pay Survey Reports
When it comes to a granular look at pay premiums for skills (both certification-based and non-certified), Foote Partners is a go-to for IT leaders. These survey-based compensation reports take a “total cash compensation” point of view that combines base salary and skills premium pay bonus data for nearly 1,000 IT and business skills, adjusting based on local market trends in 65 tier-one and tier-two U.S. cities. Foote Partners also offers detailed long-form job descriptions that are continuously updated.
3. Dice’s 2018 Tech Salary Report
While Dice’s most recent salary report shows that technology salaries, in general, were stagnant over the previous year, the technology job site notes that skills in big data, cloud, and process management are in high demand and are driving certain pockets of compensation upward. The PDF shows compensation trends by tech skill, job title, state, metro and industry; reasons for salary increases; and long-term pay trends. The site also offers a Salary Calculator to create customized, skills-based salary estimates, whether you’re a seasoned cloud architect in Jersey City, N.J. ($115,500-$151,500) or a newly minted Hadoop developer in Santa Clara, Calif. ($72,000-$96,500).
4. PayScale Salary Survey
PayScale offers the ability to build a personalized salary report with input beginning with basics like your job title, location, and experience, and layering in information like capabilities and certifications, size of budget managed, supervisory experience, type of employer, and more. The site also offers more basic salary averages for roles in tech-centric sectors like Information Technology (IT) Services, IT Consulting, and IT Systems Design and Integration.
5. Indeed’s Search and Compare
Indeed boasts more than 500 million data points behind its salary comparison search function, which provides average salaries and distribution of salary intelligence based upon employees, users, and past and present job advertisements on Indeed for the previous 36 months. Recent queries turned up average U.S. salaries of $117,996 per year for CIOs, $157,395 per year for vice presidents of IT, $114,857 per year for IT architects, and $94,234 per year for database admins. Users can also drill down by state or metropolitan area.
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