Occupation / job
Software Developers
Median annual pay. Half earn less than this.
Hourly at a standard 2,080-hour year. We do not yet have unpaid-time or cost data for this, so this is not an adjusted figure.
The middle half. A quarter earn below this range.
Source: BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025 · view
What this figure cannot tell you
It covers people EMPLOYED in this occupation. Anyone who trained for it and was never hired is not in the median above, and neither is anyone doing the work self-employed. No verified count of qualified people exists for this occupation, so this page shows none rather than an estimate. Why that matters · The occupations where we could source it
Who this suits
At $135,980 — $85,960 a year clear of the $50,020 all-occupation midpoint — Software Developers sits at the top of what BLS publishes. Read the gate before the figure: at this level there is always one, and it is usually measured in years.
With 1,687,890 employed, this is one of the biggest occupations in the country. Work at this scale is always available and rarely scarce, and the wage on this page is what that combination produces.
This work suits people who enjoy the debugging more than the building, because most of a career here is spent understanding systems somebody else already wrote.
How long it takes to become one of the 1,687,890 people doing this is not something we have a source for. BLS counts and pays them; it does not record how they got there, and we would rather say so than guess.
Who should not do this
From $105,210 to $171,980 is $5,564 a month, or 1.6x bottom quarter to top. An ordinary spread like this is mostly years and geography; assume you enter near the bottom of it and that closing the gap takes a career rather than a move.
Even at the 25th percentile Software Developers pays $105,210, $55,190 clear of the $50,020 national midpoint. Almost the entire distribution sits above the typical American wage, which is rare and worth weighing against the entry cost.
Avoid it if you expect the qualification to hold its value; here it depreciates from the day you finish.
You will not find a "what share make it" figure here. 1,687,890 is a headcount of the employed, which is a numerator without a denominator — everyone who qualified and never got hired is missing from it, and we will not estimate them to complete a percentage.
What the spread tells you
At 1.6x between $105,210 and $171,980 this is a normally shaped occupation. $135,980 is what the middle of Software Developers earns after the years it takes to get there, which is not the same as what it offers you now.
The middle half of this field earns between $105,210 and $171,980. That is $66,770 of range, with $135,980 sitting inside it as the point half the field is above and half below.
Between $105,210 and $171,980 — the two ends of the middle half — sits $135,980. Moving from the midpoint to the upper quarter is worth $36,000; the whole climb from the lower quarter is $66,770.
From $135,980 it is $30,770 down to the bottom quarter and $36,000 up to the top. The upper half of the range is the longer one, which is the ordinary shape for work where experience compounds.
Converted to an hourly rate over a full-time year: $50.58 at the bottom quarter, $65.37 at the midpoint, $82.68 at the top quarter. The typical American job works out at $24.04 on the same basis.
What these figures are, and what they are not
Employers reported these wages for people already working as Software Developers. The self-employed are excluded, so $135,980 does not describe an independent doing the same work.
With no unpaid-hours or cost data for Software Developers, the hourly figure is $135,980 over a 2,080-hour year — a unit conversion, not an adjustment.
How this is calculated · Self-employment failure rates · What credentials cost and pay back · Look up something else