Dive Brief:
- Compensation ranges across job postings have widened over the past year in areas with a large tech industry footprint, according to an Indeed report published Thursday.
- California and Washington were home to seven of the top 10 areas with the largest one-year salary range increases as of April 2023, the report found. Both states are home to large technology talent hubs, including San Francisco and Seattle.
- The Seattle metropolitan area saw the largest one-year increase in typical advertised salary ranges. As of April 2023, salary ranges there grew 21% year-over-year, compared to 14% in 2022.
Dive Insight:
California, Colorado and New York are among the states that have passed regulations on salary transparency, requiring employers to disclose salary ranges in their job postings.
The push to increase salary transparency is beginning to shape the complex supply-and-demand dynamic of the tech workforce, according to Cory Stahle, economist at Indeed.
The primary driver leading to wider compensation ranges is the state of the job market in areas with high exposure to the tech industry, according to Stahle. Wider salary ranges could reflect an openness to candidates who have non-traditional backgrounds — and less experience.
Ranges are widening for high-wage roles where demand is falling, he said.
In April, tech occupations fell nationally by nearly 100,000 positions, according to a CompTIA review of U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics data. Unemployment for tech professions rose last month to 2.3%, but continued to trail the national unemployment rate.
The software development role is indicative of the broader trend: there are fewer postings for software developers, down 6% from their pre-pandemic levels according to Stahle. Yet, "in the last year alone, that [salary] range has widened by almost 24%," he said.
Following years of strong growth, salaries in tech normalized in recent months. Tech worker salaries rose 2.3% in 2022, just one-third of the growth rate recorded in 2021, according to a Dice salary report published in February.
