Software Developers
Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV metropolitan area. Estimated employment 69,060.
Where you sit in the distribution
That is the median — half of software developers in Washington earn more.
$154,930 in Washington buys what $142,300 buys across the country as a whole.
Washington's regional price parity is 108.9 — well above the national average — a dollar here buys noticeably less than in the US as a whole. Adjusted figures for other metros are in the nearby-metros table below.
Who pays what
Median offered salary from visa filings, which disclose employer, title and exact figure. Government wage surveys never publish at this level.
| Employer | Median offer | Range | Filings | vs. metro |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Meta Platforms | $217,000 | $169k – $228k | 10 | +40.1% |
| Costar Realty Information | $204,867 | $173k – $214k | 8 | +32.2% |
| Ibm | $188,853 | $133k – $208k | 10 | +21.9% |
| Nvidia | $184,000 | $184k – $248k | 5 | +18.8% |
| AT T Services | $175,000 | $140k – $175k | 7 | +13.0% |
| CVS Shared Services Resources | $175,000 | $134k – $175k | 5 | +13.0% |
| T-mobile Usa | $174,250 | $138k – $209k | 7 | +12.5% |
Offer ranges and filing counts are in the full table on wider screens.
Nominal against real
The same median, once as published and once restated in 2025 dollars.
Published pay rose 20.3% over the five years to 2025. Adjusted for inflation it is roughly flat — software developers in Washington earn about what they earned in 2021. The two lines meet at the right edge by construction, since 2025 is the base year.
How this page was made
- Wage data
- Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025 release. Public domain.
- Price parity
- Bureau of Economic Analysis, Regional Price Parities, 2024.
- Employer pay
- Department of Labor, Labor Condition Application disclosures, FY 2025. The table draws on 52 certified filings across 7 employers.
- Inflation
- Real figures deflate by CPI-U annual averages (BLS, all items, US city average).
- Employment
- 69,060 employed in this occupation in the metro (BLS estimate; excludes the self-employed).
- Occupation
- SOC 15-1252, Software Developers. Mapped to our taxonomy as software-developers.
Percentiles are reported exactly as released and are never interpolated between published values. Visa filings record offered base salary at time of application, exclude equity and bonus, and skew toward larger employers — treat the employer table as a floor, not an average. We take no payment from employers, recruiters or anyone else for how any figure is presented.