Tech Salary Bands 2025: SWE, PM, and Designer Total Comp by Level

If you’re negotiating a tech offer in 2025 or 2026, you have an unprecedented amount of public salary data to work with. Levels.fyi, Blind, Glassdoor, and Hired.com aggregate hundreds of thousands of self-reported compensation packages each year, and the picture they paint is dramatically different from what HR will tell you in a private negotiation. Here’s a clear-eyed snapshot of what tech roles actually pay in 2025, what’s changing post-2023 layoffs, and how to use this data in a counter-offer.

Software engineer compensation by level (US, public companies)

Software engineering remains the highest-paying tech track at most companies. Here’s a representative range for total annual compensation (base + annual bonus + RSU vest, averaged across the four-year vesting window), based on Levels.fyi medians for tier-1 markets like San Francisco and Seattle in 2025:

Level	Years of experience	Median total comp	Top quartile total comp
L3 / Junior (entry)	0–2	$190K	$230K
L4 / Mid (SWE II)	2–5	$260K	$320K
L5 / Senior	5–9	$370K	$480K
L6 / Staff	9–13	$540K	$720K
L7 / Senior Staff / Principal	13+	$750K	$1.1M+
L8 / Distinguished	17+	$1.1M	$2M+

These numbers are heavily skewed by FAANG, Anthropic, OpenAI, Stripe, Databricks, and similar high-paying employers. Roles at smaller or non-tech-native companies typically pay 20-40% lower at the same level. Government, education, and most enterprise software companies pay even less.

Product manager bands

Product management compensation tracks similar patterns to engineering but with more variance based on company prestige and product impact:

Level	Median total comp	Top quartile
APM / Associate PM	$185K	$230K
PM (mid-level)	$250K	$310K
Senior PM	$330K	$430K
Group PM / Lead PM	$440K	$570K
Principal PM	$550K	$750K
Director PM	$650K+	$900K+

Product roles at high-growth companies (Stripe, Linear, Notion, Anthropic) often exceed these medians by 20–40%, while traditional enterprise software product roles tend to come in below.

Designer bands

Design compensation has narrowed relative to engineering in recent years but remains strong at top consumer companies:

Level	Median total comp	Top quartile
Junior designer	$130K	$170K
Mid-level designer	$190K	$240K
Senior designer	$270K	$350K
Staff designer	$370K	$480K
Principal / Director	$500K+	$700K+

Design Engineer hybrid roles (people who can design and ship code) command an additional 15–25% premium and are among the most in-demand titles in 2025.

What changed after the 2023-2024 tech layoffs

The 2022-2024 tech layoff cycle compressed compensation modestly at the lower levels but expanded it at the top. Senior engineers, staff-level talent, and applied AI specialists are commanding higher packages than ever, while entry-level and mid-level offers have flattened or modestly declined. The single biggest shift is that AI/ML researcher roles at frontier labs (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta GenAI) now routinely exceed $1M total compensation for senior individual contributors — a band previously reserved for executive roles.

Equity refreshes matter

Public salary data often focuses on initial grant. The under-appreciated component is the annual equity refresh — additional RSU grants companies issue each year on top of your initial grant, typically equal to 25-50% of your initial grant per year for high performers. After 4-5 years of refreshes, your total annual equity income can substantially exceed your initial grant’s annual value. This is why tenure at a single high-paying company often beats job-hopping after year 2-3.

How to use this data in a negotiation

The single most effective way to use salary band data is to anchor your counter-offer to a specific data point. Rather than saying “the market pays more,” say “Levels.fyi data for L5 SWE roles at companies of your size in San Francisco shows the median total comp is $370,000. The current offer is $310,000. Could the package be brought closer to median?” This is harder to dismiss than a vague market reference and gives the recruiter a concrete number to bring back to the hiring manager.

The free Negotiation Script Generator automatically incorporates market data references into the email, verbal, and counter-offer templates it generates.

Don’t forget cost of living

Headline numbers in San Francisco often translate to far less in real purchasing power once you account for housing and tax. A $400K total comp in SF is roughly equivalent to $280K in Austin after housing costs and 9.3% California state income tax. Use the free Cost of Living Adjuster to translate any salary band number into your target city before deciding whether an offer is competitive.

Run your specific offer through the math

Public salary band data tells you what’s “normal” but it doesn’t tell you what your specific offer is worth. The free Offer Analyzer takes the offer letter in front of you — base, sign-on, RSU, vesting, 401(k), benefits — and converts it into a single Total Annual Effective Compensation figure that you can directly compare to band medians. If two offers are on the table, the Compare Two Offers tool runs both through the same lens.