US pay-transparency laws mean most tech job postings now include a base-salary range. I collected every open job from 46 well-known companies' career sites on 26 October 2026 and took the software engineer postings that list a range: 1,067 postings at 34 companies.
The numbers
Median midpoint of the posted base-salary range, US software engineer postings (all levels except intern, manager and principal):
| Company | Median midpoint | Postings |
|---|---|---|
| Anthropic | $402k | 83 |
| OpenAI | $356k | 146 |
| Perplexity | $312k | 38 |
| Replit | $295k | 11 |
| $271k | 18 | |
| Asana | $265k | 8 |
| Figma | $264k | 9 |
| Ramp | $255k | 11 |
| Toast | $251k | 16 |
| Robinhood | $250k | 19 |
| Stripe | $242k | 12 |
| Scale AI | $241k | 18 |
| Zoox | $238k | 45 |
| Airbnb | $238k | 16 |
| Instacart | $236k | 7 |
| $229k | 41 | |
| Affirm | $225k | 35 |
| Databricks | $222k | 92 |
| Roblox | $220k | 87 |
| Discord | $220k | 15 |
| Brex | $216k | 30 |
| Datadog | $216k | 11 |
| Samsara | $207k | 13 |
| Coinbase | $202k | 48 |
| Okta | $196k | 19 |
| Chime | $196k | 18 |
| Notion | $190k | 13 |
| MongoDB | $187k | 13 |
| Gusto | $184k | 21 |
| Elastic | $172k | 12 |
| DoorDash | $169k | 36 |
| Palantir | $168k | 73 |
| Lyft | $166k | 9 |
| Twilio | $156k | 9 |
The overall median across all 1,067 postings is $230k: $235k for senior/staff titles and $219k for the rest.
Three things that surprised me
- The AI labs are in a different band. Anthropic's and OpenAI's typical posted midpoints are $100k+ above the middle of the list. A typical OpenAI range is $266k–$445k.
- Ranges aren't only posted where the law requires it. Across all of these companies' US jobs (not just engineering), 91% of postings in states without a pay-transparency law (Texas, Ohio, Arizona and others) still showed a range, the same share as in states with one (excluding Carvana, a large employer of hourly staff that mostly doesn't post ranges outside those states). Most tech companies publish ranges everywhere.
- Ranges are wide but not absurd. Across all 4,645 US postings with a range, the median range is 1.35× from bottom to top (e.g. $150k–$203k); about one in five is 1.5× or wider.
Caveats
- Base salary only. Equity and bonus are excluded, and at many of these companies they're a large share of total pay.
- Level mix differs by company. A company hiring mostly senior engineers will look higher. Treat this as "what they're hiring for now", not a like-for-like level comparison.
- Location mix. Most postings are in San Francisco, New York and Seattle, where ranges are highest.
- Companies with fewer than 5 software engineer postings with a range are left out.
How I collected it
All of these companies host their careers pages on Greenhouse, Lever or Ashby, which serve public job-board JSON. I used an Apify Actor I built, Career Site Jobs Scraper, which takes any Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Workday or SmartRecruiters careers URL and returns every open job with its description. Then a few lines of Python: a regex for $X – $Y ranges in the description (Ashby and Lever also return structured salary fields), a title filter for software engineer roles, and a median per company.
import re, statistics
RANGE = re.compile(r"\$\s?\d{1,3}(?:,\d{3})*[kK]?\s*(?:-|–|—|to)\s*\$?\s?\d{1,3}(?:,\d{3})*[kK]?")
SWE = re.compile(r"software engineer|software developer|backend engineer|frontend engineer|full[- ]?stack engineer|member of technical staff", re.I)
def midpoint(text):
m = RANGE.search(text or "")
if not m:
return None
lo, hi = [float(x.replace(",", "").rstrip("kK")) * (1000 if x[-1] in "kK" else 1)
for x in re.findall(r"\d{1,3}(?:,\d{3})*[kK]?", m.group(0))]
return (lo + hi) / 2 if 60_000 <= lo <= hi else None
If you want a company added, name it in the comments and I'll rerun it (it needs a Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Workday or SmartRecruiters careers site).
Disclosure: I built the scraper used here. The data comes from the companies' own public job postings.
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