Software Quality Assurance Analysts and Testers

$104,300 against a $50,020 national midpoint is 109% more, or $26.09 an hour. Almost nothing pays this much more without a long, expensive or restricted route in — read that route before reading the number again.

186,740 people are employed as Software Quality Assurance Analysts and Testers. At that size there is a real ladder and enough churn that experience can be sold to a competitor rather than only accumulated where you are.

Computing suits people who can keep learning after what they learned stops being used. The skill with the longest half-life is the habit of relearning, not any particular stack.

We carry no verified training length for Software Quality Assurance Analysts and Testers — BLS reports pay, not preparation, and we will not estimate it.

$80,310 to $133,180 — 1.7x, or $4,405 a month between the quarters. An unremarkable spread, which means the useful planning number for Software Quality Assurance Analysts and Testers is the bottom of it rather than the middle.

The 25th percentile is $80,310, $30,290 above the $50,020 typical American job. When even the floor is this high, the thing to investigate is the entry requirement rather than the pay.

Avoid it if you expect the qualification to hold its value; here it depreciates from the day you finish.

There is no failure rate on this page because there is nothing honest to divide by. BLS counted 186,740 people employed as Software Quality Assurance Analysts and Testers; it did not count the people who trained for it and are doing something else, and a rate built without that denominator would be a number we made up.

1.7x between $80,310 and $133,180 is the ordinary shape of an occupation where experience and region both matter and neither dominates. $104,300 is a fair expectation by mid-career, not on day one.

Put in money rather than ratios: $80,310 at the 25th percentile, $104,300 at the midpoint, $133,180 at the 75th. $52,870 separates the quarter of Software Quality Assurance Analysts and Testers at the bottom from the quarter at the top.

Getting to $133,180, the 75th percentile, is worth $28,880 a year more than the $104,300 midpoint and $52,870 more than the $80,310 a quarter of Software Quality Assurance Analysts and Testers settle for.

From $104,300 it is $23,990 down to the bottom quarter and $28,880 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: $38.61 at the bottom quarter, $50.14 at the midpoint, $64.02 at the top quarter. The typical American job works out at $24.04 on the same basis.