Mobile App Developer Salaries Across the Globe: 2017 Edition

When you look at industry stats, you want them to come from a source that lives and breaths the industry. For tech salaries, Hired is a good choice, with a huge wealth of data driven by their go-to international career connection platform. Their 2017 study was released this week, and it shows some intriguing data that could serve as a benchmark for judging salary drift in a turbulent US political and economic climate — for better or worse.

Overall, the trends are up consistent with past year reports. For Bay Area mobile app developers, salaries are significantly higher, although much (if not all) of the difference is eaten up by higher living expenses and legendarily steep rent.

San Francisco app developers have seen a 3.28% raise since 2015, compared to 2.14% in Seattle, the second-place city for highest salaries. London, meanwhile, saw a –1.7% decrease in average salaries, and analysts expect that figure could flatline or drop slightly more over the next couple years depending on how the fallout from Brexit affects the local economy and international tech community stationed there.

Among the factors of the tech job market analyzed in the Hired report, some of the most interesting data looks closely at the effect of bias on ultimate take-home salary for developers. Their data shows that African-American software engineers take home $15,000 less than their white peers annually, while Asian and Latino workers of equivalent experience and background pull in $5,000–$7,000 less. Hired data also shows a higher demand for African-American employees, with faster hiring rates and times. Whether this is due to scarcity or simple economics is unclear.

Interestingly, popular culture’s notion that younger engineers get paid drastically more than older workers doesn’t hold entirely true in the data. Overall, salaries seemed to peak around age 45.

As tech weathers the turbulence of the next few years of regulation overhaul and immigration changes, app developers will be watching closely to see how that affects average developer salaries — here in the US, and worldwide.