In late 2023, a new grad posted on LinkedIn about a $187,000 total comp offer from a FAANG company. The post got 47,000 likes. I’m pretty sure that did more damage to realistic salary expectations for entry-level engineers than anything else that year.
The number wasn’t fake. It just wasn’t normal. It was the kind of outlier that gets shared precisely because it’s an outlier, and then people do the mental math backwards and decide they’re being underpaid when they get a $92,000 offer from a Series B company in Austin.
Here’s what entry-level tech salaries in 2026 actually look like for most people.
The basic ranges by role
I’m pulling these from the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook and cross-checking against the 2024 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, which is more granular on compensation by experience level. These are base salary figures for US-based roles, mostly at companies that aren’t FAANG.
- Software engineer (entry-level): $75,000 to $110,000
- Frontend engineer: $68,000 to $98,000
- Data analyst: $58,000 to $88,000
- Data engineer (entry): $80,000 to $115,000
- DevOps / cloud infrastructure: $78,000 to $105,000
- Product manager (associate): $70,000 to $95,000
- QA / SDET: $60,000 to $85,000
FAANG and FAANG-tier companies (Stripe, Coinbase, Airbnb, Databricks, etc.) push the top of these ranges significantly higher. But they also reject the vast majority of candidates at the entry level. If you’re comparing your offer against a number from levels.fyi, check the company tier first.
Location still drives a lot of variance
This is obvious but worth saying plainly: a $90,000 software engineering job in San Francisco and a $90,000 software engineering job in Columbus are not equivalent offers. The San Francisco offer, after rent and taxes, is worse in most scenarios.
The shift toward remote work created a period from 2020 to 2022 where some companies paid San Francisco salaries to engineers in lower-cost cities. That mostly compressed back. Most companies now either pay on a geographic band (you get paid at a rate based on your metro area) or pay a single national rate that’s a compromise between high-cost and low-cost markets.
The cities with the consistently highest absolute salaries for new grads are Seattle, San Francisco, and New York. The cities with the best salary-to-cost-of-living ratio for new grads are probably a moving target right now, but Austin, Denver, and Raleigh-Durham tend to come up in the data.
If you’re choosing between a high-cost city offer and a remote-first offer with geographic banding, the honest answer is that the math depends on where you actually want to live and how you value the career benefits of being in person at certain companies. I don’t think there’s a single right call there.
What the Stack Overflow survey actually shows
The 2024 Stack Overflow Developer Survey had responses from about 65,000 developers worldwide. For developers in the US with less than two years of experience, median compensation came in around $78,000 to $85,000. That’s median, which means roughly half are above and half below.
The survey also shows some other things worth knowing:
- Developers who use cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) in their work earn meaningfully more than those who don’t, even at the entry level.
- Bootcamp graduates and self-taught developers report compensation within roughly $8,000 to $12,000 of CS degree holders at the entry level, at least in the early years. The gap widens at mid-level and above.
- Full-time remote work is still correlated with slightly higher compensation than in-office work, though the gap has narrowed since 2021.
The internship conversion path
If you’re still in school or recently graduated, internship conversion is one of the most reliable paths to a strong first offer. Companies that convert interns to full-time hires tend to offer higher base salaries than cold-application hires, partly because they’ve already done the hiring risk assessment.
Conversion rates vary a lot by company and year. In 2021 and 2022, conversion rates were unusually high across the industry, and some companies hired more interns than they had room for. That corrected in 2023 and 2024. Right now the more useful number to track isn’t the overall conversion rate, it’s the conversion rate at specific companies you’re targeting, which you can often get from Glassdoor intern reviews or by asking the recruiter directly.
What changes your starting offer
A few things reliably move the number within a given range:
Prior internship at a strong brand. An internship at Google, Meta, or a well-known startup puts you in a different pool than a candidate with no industry experience, even if the skills are similar. Recruiters at smaller companies see it as de-risking.
Competing offers. This is the most reliable lever. If you have two offers, even from similar-tier companies, the fact that you have competing offers changes the negotiation. Companies that wouldn’t ordinarily move on starting salary will often move when there’s a specific competing number to respond to. I’ve seen this work even when the competing offer was lower, just because it signals you’re genuinely evaluating options.
Specialization. Security, ML infrastructure, and embedded systems all command premiums relative to general software engineering at the entry level. The supply of qualified candidates for those specializations is smaller than the general pool.
The specific company’s situation. A company that just raised a Series B with $40 million in the bank has different budget flexibility than a company at Series A with 18 months of runway. This matters more than most candidates think when evaluating whether an offer is negotiable.
What’s changed in 2025 and 2026
The tech layoffs of 2022 to 2024 made the entry-level market noticeably harder. Companies that were hiring 100-engineer cohorts of new grads cut those programs significantly. Some of the biggest names in tech stopped running new-grad programs entirely during the downturn.
The recovery has been uneven. Infrastructure, AI/ML adjacent roles, and security engineering are hiring. General software engineering at mid-size consumer tech companies is still competitive. The BLS projects software developer employment to grow 25% through 2032, which is faster than average, but that’s a long timeframe projection and doesn’t tell you much about what the market looks like in a specific 6-month window.
If you’re entering the market in 2026, the realistic picture is: strong starting salaries exist, they’re accessible if you interview well, and they’re more available in certain specializations and geographies than others. The $187,000 offers still happen. They’re just not the benchmark to measure yourself against.