2025-11-21T10:00:01.257Z
Data guru Hakeem Shibly recently dug into every US software engineering pay package shared with Levels.fyi in the past year.
His goal: Figure out which cities pay engineers the best after adjusting for the cost of living.
The Greater Seattle Area tops the list, followed by Austin — ahead of the big dog, Silicon Valley, which ranked third.
A few surprises: Denver and Boulder edge out bigger, older hubs such as Chicago. The Raleigh-Durham research area in North Carolina ranks pretty high, offering solid compensation along with a reasonable cost of living.
Want more options beyond Big Tech hubs like Silicon Valley and the Seattle area? San Diego, Dallas, and Atlanta offer software engineers a solid combination of pay and manageable living expenses, according to Levels.fyi data.
If you want to know which tech jobs pay what kind of money, check out Business Insider’s salary data here.
And here’s the data from Levels.fyi, in a handy chart from BI’s awesome graphics crew:
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