Though the US tech and IT sectors noticed main layoffs in mid-2020 as a result of COVID-19 pandemic, the sectors have recovered many of the misplaced jobs. Even higher, salaries truly rose by 3.6% in 2020, in accordance with Cube.com’s 2021 Tech Wage Report — and can proceed to take action in 2021.
However the wage development accrued to only 52% of tech staff surveyed; 35% noticed flat wages, and the remainder (13%) noticed declines. Those that noticed declines cited a change of employer, layoffs, or company-wide wage reductions as the principle causes — all of them results of the pandemic.
Regional wage developments
Salaries each in California’s Silicon Valley and in Boston rose 2.4%, in keeping with the nationwide common. However they exploded in a number of tech hubs:
- Charlotte, N.C., noticed a 13.8% rise in wage to $99,691.
- Orlando noticed a 13.4% rise to $88,598.
- New York Metropolis noticed a 11.6% rise to $114,274.
- Austin, Texas, noticed a 9.7% rise to $104,344.
- Philadelphia noticed a 9.3% rise to $96,512.
Detroit, Phoenix, Houston, Minneapolis, and metro Baltimore-Washington all noticed wage rises of greater than 5%.
Portland, Oregon, noticed a 4.6% drop in salaries to $98,026, whereas Seattle noticed a 2.6% decline in salaries to $106,723. Tampa noticed a 11% decline to $87,809, Columbus, OH, a 0.6% decline to $91,483, and Chicago, a 0.1% decline to $94,581.
Cube notes that the survey pattern in Columbus was fewer than 100 respondents, so the information is just not statistically legitimate however included for continuity with previous years’ reviews.
Trying on the survey outcomes by state, Maryland had the best wage development: up 13.1% to $109,886, adopted by Wisconsin at 9.6% to $97,322 and North Carolina at 9.5% to $97,739. New York, New Jersey, Michigan, Indiana, Florida, Connecticut, Texas, Colorado, and Virginia all had common wage rises of 5% or extra.
Washington state noticed the most important drop, of 4.4% to $103,995, adopted by Missouri of 1.8% to $87,460, Oregon of 0.6% to $97,317, and Illinois of 0.5% to $93,385. No different states had declines. Cube notes that the survey had sufficient statistically vital information for 25 states.

Common tech salaries by tech hub.
Wage developments by occupation
The Cube survey reveals that cybersecurity analysts gained the best wage raises, up 16.3% to $103,106. Cube famous that these less-experienced positions noticed a lot larger wage rises than extremely expert cybersecurity engineers (up 4.3% to $134,430), suggesting a scarcity of cybersecurity candidates was pushing up wages for junior workers.
Tech help engineers got here in second, up 8.2% to $68,651, adopted by cloud engineers, up 6.3% to $136,479 and enterprise analysts, up 5.3% to $96,633. The survey confirmed that information scientists and devops engineers each noticed wage development of greater than 10%, however neither group had sufficient respondents to be statistically legitimate.
Occupations that noticed wage declines have been conventional IT roles. Database admins noticed salaries lower by 4.9% to $99,038, adopted by assist desk technicians who have been down 4% to $51,553, IT managers who have been down 1.7% to $143,416, and product managers who have been down 0.6% to $12,584. The survey confirmed that mainframe programmer salaries have been down 11.2%, however there weren’t sufficient respondents to be statistically legitimate.
Wage developments by abilities
Of the 25 abilities with highest common salaries, people who received the best wage will increase have been for the RabbitMQ messaging dealer (up 10.1% to $136,151); Vagrant for virtual-environment administration (up 8.5% to $123,615); AI (up 7.2% to $131,907); pure language processing (up 4.8% to $131,542); and the OmniGraffle diagramming instrument (up 4.6% to $124,074).
Of the 25 abilities with highest common salaries, the abilities that noticed the steepest wage declines have been SAP HANA (down 7.1% to $124,918); the Go language (down 6.1% to $128,001); and Apache Kafka for distributed messaging (down 4.3% to $128,971).
For programmers, the highest 5 salaries have been for individuals skilled in TensorFlow, Go language, Scala, KornShell, and Perl, all of which exceeded $122,000. However apart from Perl, all these languages — and most others — noticed a lower in wage in 2020. Of the 25 languages surveyed, solely 10 confirmed wage rises. The highest languages when it comes to wage development have been Tcl (up 7.8%), Matlab (up 6.2%), Fortran (up 5.2%), Perl (3.9%), and Transact-SQL (up 3.4%).