The Software Developer Map

Software developers — BLS occupation code 15-1252 — represent 1.07% of America’s 154.2 million workers. They are, by headcount, a rounding error. By economic weight, they are a force of nature. The 1,654,440 developers tracked in the May 2024 OEWS survey earn a national median of $133,080 and a mean of $144,570. Multiply that mean across the entire occupation and you get an estimated annual payroll of $239 billion — roughly equivalent to the GDP of Portugal, or the combined annual revenue of Coca-Cola, Nike, and Goldman Sachs.

The occupation has grown at a remarkable pace. In 2021 — the first year under the current SOC code after the Bureau reclassified tech occupations — there were 1,364,180 software developers. By 2024, that number had risen to 1,654,440, a 21.3% increase in three years. For context, total U.S. employment grew roughly 5% over the same period. Software development is adding workers at more than four times the national rate, even as headlines warn about AI replacing coders and tech companies announce periodic layoffs. The layoffs are real. So is the net growth. Companies beyond traditional tech — banks, hospitals, automakers, retailers, insurers — are absorbing developers as fast as Silicon Valley sheds them.

The wage distribution is extraordinarily wide. A developer at the 10th percentile earns $79,850 — already well above the national all-occupation median of $49,500. A developer at the 90th percentile earns $211,450. The P90/P10 ratio is 2.65, meaning the highest-paid developers earn 2.65 times what the lowest-paid ones do. This is tighter than most occupations because the floor is so high: even the worst-paid software developers in America earn more than the median worker in 49 of 51 states.

But these national averages hide the real story. Software development is arguably the most geographically stratified occupation in the American economy. The same job title, the same code on the same BLS form, pays $208,270 in San Jose and $86,460 in Mississippi — a 2.4x gap that no amount of cost-of-living adjustment can fully explain. Where a developer works matters as much as what they build.

California is the center of the developer universe, and it isn’t close. The state employs 292,630 software developers — 17.7% of the national total — at a median wage of $170,910 and a mean of $185,750. That translates to an estimated state-level developer payroll of $54.4 billion, nearly triple the next-highest state. To put that in perspective: California’s software developer payroll alone exceeds the entire GDP of Vermont. If California’s developers were a country, their collective earnings would rank them among the world’s top 80 economies.

Texas ranks second with 151,460 developers at a $130,500 median, generating $20.2 billion in payroll. Texas’s developer population has surged — the Dallas-Fort Worth metro alone grew from 42,880 developers in 2021 to 63,430 in 2024, a 48% increase that makes it the fastest-growing major tech market in the country. The draw is no mystery: Texas has no state income tax, housing costs a fraction of the Bay Area, and companies like Tesla (which moved its headquarters from Palo Alto to Austin in 2021), Oracle (Austin), and Charles Schwab (Westlake) have relocated, bringing thousands of tech jobs with them.

New York (104,130 developers, $161,260 median, $16.7B payroll), Washington state (91,470, $166,910, $16.1B), and Virginia (83,290, $134,470, $11.9B) round out the top five. Together, these five states employ 723,000 developers — 43.7% of the national total. Add Florida (82,610), North Carolina (57,590), New Jersey (57,120), Illinois (54,490), and Massachusetts (54,260), and the top ten states account for over one million developers, or roughly two-thirds of the entire profession.

At the other end, Alaska employs 430 software developers. Wyoming has 1,020. North Dakota has 1,510. Mississippi has 3,200. These aren’t states that lack technology — they lack the corporate headquarters, venture capital ecosystems, defense contractors, and research universities that concentrate developer employment. Mississippi’s 3,200 developers at a $86,460 median are scattered across healthcare IT departments, small government agencies, and the occasional regional firm. There is no agglomeration effect, no talent pipeline, no startup ecosystem pushing wages upward through competition.

Raw headcount favors big states. A more revealing measure is developer density — how many software developers exist per 1,000 workers in each state. This strips out population effects and reveals which economies are genuinely built around software versus merely large enough to have some.

Washington state leads at 25.84 developers per 1,000 jobs — meaning roughly 1 in 39 workers in the state writes code for a living. This is the Amazon and Microsoft effect: two of the five largest tech companies on earth are headquartered in the Seattle metro, and their combined presence has created a gravitational field that draws in thousands of smaller firms, cloud computing startups, and enterprise software companies. Virginia ranks second at 20.49, driven by the defense and intelligence contracting corridor in Northern Virginia where companies like Leidos, Booz Allen Hamilton, and the CIA’s technical workforce cluster around government agencies.

Utah (17.05) and Colorado (16.94) are the surprise entries in the top tier. Utah’s “Silicon Slopes” — centered on Provo, Lehi, and Salt Lake City — has produced companies like Qualtrics (acquired by SAP for $8 billion), Pluralsight, Domo, and dozens of other SaaS firms. The state’s developer density now exceeds California’s (16.21), though California’s absolute numbers remain far larger. Colorado’s concentration is driven by Denver, Boulder, and Colorado Springs — a mix of defense tech, aerospace, and an increasingly large contingent of remote workers who moved from the coasts for the mountains and kept their tech salaries.

At the bottom of the density rankings, the pattern is stark. Louisiana has just 2.03 developers per 1,000 jobs. Mississippi has 2.76. Nevada has 3.03. Alaska has 1.35. These are economies dominated by oil and gas, agriculture, tourism, and resource extraction — industries that employ relatively few software developers. The density gap between Washington (25.84) and Louisiana (2.03) is 12.7 to 1. For every developer in Louisiana’s workforce, Washington has nearly thirteen.

At the metro level, the developer market splits into three distinct tiers, each with its own economics and competitive dynamics. The first tier is the superstar metros where developer wages exceed $150,000 — places where the competition for talent is so intense that salaries have decoupled from the rest of the economy. San Jose leads at $208,270, followed by San Francisco ($174,910), Seattle ($169,340), New York ($161,970), Boulder ($159,670), and San Diego ($159,240). In these markets, a P10 developer — someone at the very bottom of the local pay scale — still earns above the national developer median. San Jose’s P10 is $134,830, which exceeds the national developer median of $133,080. Even the worst-paid developers in Silicon Valley earn more than the typical developer elsewhere.

The second tier ranges from $125,000 to $150,000 and includes most major metros: Boston ($154,240), Washington ($150,880), Portland ($149,010), Denver ($134,120), Austin ($133,070), Charlotte ($132,100), Dallas ($131,490), Raleigh ($131,390), Atlanta ($130,830), and Chicago ($130,030). These are the cities fighting to become “the next Austin” — metros with growing tech sectors, lower costs of living than the coasts, and aggressive incentive programs aimed at luring corporate relocations. North Carolina alone has three metros in this tier (Charlotte, Durham, Raleigh), a reflection of the Research Triangle ecosystem and the finance-tech corridor in Charlotte.

The third tier is the sub-$110,000 market: places like Lansing ($92,500), Cleveland ($102,790), Wichita ($102,440), Fayetteville ($102,030), Milwaukee ($104,500), and Indianapolis ($105,990). These metros have developers — often thousands of them — but they are typically embedded in traditional industries: insurance companies in Hartford, medical device firms in Minneapolis, auto suppliers in Detroit, banking back offices in Columbus. The developers in these markets build internal tools, maintain legacy systems, and support operational technology. They rarely build consumer-facing products or work for venture-backed startups, and their pay reflects this difference.

The gap between tiers is enormous. A developer in San Jose earns 2.25 times what a developer in Lansing earns — $208,270 versus $92,500. Even adjusting for cost of living, the San Jose developer comes out ahead. The BLS doesn’t publish cost-of-living-adjusted wage data, but third-party estimates suggest San Jose’s cost of living is roughly 80–90% higher than Lansing’s. An 80% cost-of-living premium on a 125% wage premium still leaves a substantial real advantage for the San Jose developer — before considering stock compensation, which the BLS doesn’t measure and which adds tens of thousands more at the tier-one metros.

The most striking pattern in the developer data is not the snapshot — it’s the movement. Between 2021 and 2024, the developer workforce grew by 290,000 nationally, but that growth was distributed in ways that would have been hard to predict a decade ago. The biggest winner was Dallas-Fort Worth, which added 20,550 developers (from 42,880 to 63,430) — a 47.9% increase in three years. No other major metro came close in percentage terms. Dallas now has more developers than Atlanta, Denver, or Minneapolis.

The other Texas metros followed suit. Austin grew from 21,940 to 28,210 (+28.6%), cementing its reputation as the state’s startup capital. Nationally, New York added 26,510 developers (+28.5%), rising from 93,100 to 119,610 and solidifying its position as the largest developer market in the country by headcount. San Jose added 22,500 (+33.2%), pushing past 90,000 developers despite the post-pandemic narrative that Silicon Valley was dying.

But not every tech hub grew. Seattle, home to Amazon and Microsoft, saw its developer count decline from 73,860 to 72,730 — a loss of 1,130 developers despite wages rising 11.4% to $169,340. Atlanta went nearly flat, edging down from 36,080 to 35,900. San Francisco grew from 64,460 to 76,900 (+19.3%), but this growth was slower than Dallas, Austin, NYC, or San Jose. The pattern suggests a bifurcation: the very largest hubs (San Jose, NYC) are still growing and pulling away, while the mid-tier hubs (Seattle, Atlanta) are losing ground to sunbelt competitors that offer lower taxes and cheaper housing.

The wage growth story adds another dimension. Austin’s developer median surged from $103,410 to $133,070 — a 28.7% increase that is among the steepest in the country. New York rose 25.5%. San Jose rose 26.2%. Meanwhile, Atlanta managed only 5.1% growth and Denver barely moved (9.2%). The metros that are adding the most developers are also the ones where wages are rising fastest — a pattern of winner-take-more that mirrors the broader dynamics of the tech labor market.

One of the most useful ways to understand what developers earn is to compare their pay to the local median — the wage premium that being a developer confers relative to everyone else in the same state. Nationally, the developer median of $133,080 is 2.69 times the all-occupation median of $49,500. But this premium varies enormously by state, and the pattern is counterintuitive.

The states where developers enjoy the highest premium are not the states where developers earn the most in absolute dollars. California has the highest wage premium at 3.00x — a developer earning $170,910 in a state where the typical worker earns $56,940. North Carolina (2.79x), Nevada (2.78x), New York (2.75x), and Texas (2.75x) follow. These are states where the all-occupation median is modest but the developer median is high, creating a wide gap between tech workers and everyone else.

The premium is lowest in DC at just 1.55x. This isn’t because DC developers earn poorly — their $136,040 median is above the national average — but because DC’s all-occupation median of $88,000 is so high that the premium shrinks. When lawyers, lobbyists, and government managers all earn six figures, a developer’s salary doesn’t stand out. South Dakota (1.92x) and North Dakota (1.96x) are also low, but for the opposite reason: their developers earn relatively little ($87,770 and $98,550) in states where the overall median is solidly middle-of-the-pack.

For workers considering where to live and what to study, the premium data carries practical implications. In California or North Carolina, choosing software development over the median local career triples your income. In DC or Wisconsin, it merely doubles it. The occupation’s economic power is greatest not where wages are highest in absolute terms, but where the gap between tech and non-tech is widest — places where developers are a rare species among a sea of lower-paid workers.

Where a developer works geographically matters. But which industry they work in matters almost as much. The BLS breaks out developer employment by sector, and the differences are revealing. The largest single employer of software developers is Computer Systems Design and Related Services — the consulting and outsourcing firms like Accenture, Infosys, Cognizant, and thousands of smaller shops. This sector employs 519,920 developers (31% of the total) at a median of $129,890. These are the developers building custom software for other companies, maintaining enterprise systems, and staffing project-based engagements.

Software Publishers — companies like Microsoft, Salesforce, Adobe, and Intuit that build and sell software as their primary product — employ 154,190 developers at a higher median of $149,990. The Information sector overall (which includes both software publishers and data processing firms) accounts for 330,980 developers. Finance and Insurance employs 160,000 developers at $132,880, reflecting the massive technology buildout at firms like JPMorgan Chase (which employs roughly 60,000 technologists globally), Goldman Sachs, and the major insurance companies.

Manufacturing employs 141,300 developers at $134,910 — a figure that surprises many people who associate manufacturing with assembly lines rather than code. But modern manufacturing is deeply software-dependent: autonomous vehicles need millions of lines of code, semiconductor fabs run on proprietary control systems, and defense contractors employ vast engineering teams. The highest-paying manufacturing subsector is Computer and Electronic Product Manufacturing (76,580 developers at $157,300 median) — companies like Apple, Intel, Nvidia, and Qualcomm that design chips and hardware but employ as many software engineers as hardware engineers.

The industry breakdown reveals an important truth: software development has become a horizontal occupation, embedded in every sector of the economy rather than confined to a “tech industry.” Banks, hospitals, car manufacturers, insurance companies, and wholesale distributors all employ thousands of developers. The “tech sector” as traditionally defined accounts for less than half of all developer employment. The majority of developers in America don’t work in tech — they work in industries that have become inseparable from the software that runs them.

The developer map creates a paradox that shapes American economic inequality in ways that extend far beyond the developers themselves. The metros with the highest developer concentrations — San Jose (LQ 7.42), Seattle (3.25), San Francisco (2.98) — are also the metros with the highest housing costs, the greatest income inequality, and the most polarized labor markets. When 90,000 workers earning $200,000+ cluster in a metro area of one million total jobs, they bid up housing prices, restaurant bills, and childcare costs in ways that squeeze every other worker in the same geography.

The BLS data makes this visible through 509 metros that report developer employment. Of these, only 106 metros have a developer location quotient above 1.0 (meaning above-average concentration). The remaining 403 metros — 79% of all metros — have below-average developer presence. This is an occupation that has clustered more aggressively than almost any other, concentrating its economic benefits in a narrow set of places while leaving most of the country underserved.

Yet the concentration is also what makes those places rich. San Jose’s 90,280 developers generate an estimated $18.8 billion in annual wages. Those wages are spent locally on housing, food, transportation, and services — creating a multiplier effect that supports hundreds of thousands of additional jobs. Economic research suggests the local multiplier for tech jobs is roughly 5:1 — every tech job creates roughly five additional service jobs in the same metro. If that estimate holds, San Jose’s 90,000 developers indirectly support 450,000 other jobs, from baristas to dentists to auto mechanics. Remove the developers, and the entire economy deflates.

This is the concentration paradox: the same clustering that creates wealth in some places creates deprivation in others. Every developer who moves from Mississippi to San Jose raises the median in San Jose and lowers it in Mississippi. Every company that consolidates its engineering team from Birmingham to Austin strengthens Austin and weakens Birmingham. The developer map is a zero-sum game dressed up as growth — and the data shows it’s getting more concentrated, not less, despite years of promises that remote work would flatten the map.