In this article, I focus on Python developers who are working as employees in companies. If you are interested in the (even higher) salary of Python freelancers, check out this article on my blog.
Because this is a common question on my blog, I’ve compiled a list of answers from various sources. Believe it or not, the truth is at least $100,000 per year gross income. This data is highly credible, it is based on various independent resources. The killer argument for this number comes last.
So here’s the list of sources:
- The average Python salary according to Daxx.com is $110,021 in the US. In New York and California, they gross $120,000 and more according to their data.
- The average Python salary according to Indeed is $118,399 in the US.
- The average Python salary according to Glassdoor is $86,209 in the US. This is the most pessimistic estimation I’ve found. However, it’s only based on 63 data points at the time of writing.
- The average Python salary according to Payscale is $88,711 in the US. However, there’s an additional reported bonus of $6,404, commissions of $7,000, and profit-sharing of $6,060. Together, the gross salary with all additional bonuses sums up to $108,175. Hence, it’s similar to the above salary data.
- There are many sources which rely on the above resources (they are cited again and again). For example, this Medium article cites Indeed and reports an average Python salary of $116,000.
- The average Python salary according to 6Figr is $103,000 in the US. It’s based on only 6 reported profiles. Yet, the data is sampled independently of the other resources so it’s still valuable information.
Now, if you don’t believe these privately collected data sets, here’s one data set you’ll trust: the official US salary data for various professions. This highly trustworthy resource is based on 1.6 million data points! So the result is statistically sound and based on unbiased data.
The annual mean wage of software developers in the US is $104,480.
Python is usually among the top-earning programming languages so consider this a lower bound.