2026 Edition · An annual reference on what work pays

Software Quality Assurance Analysts and Testers

New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ metropolitan area. Estimated employment 11,460.

Data released May 2025 BLS OEWS · SOC 15-1253
Fig. 1 — The wage rule

Where you sit in the distribution

Drag the marker, or type a figure
$130,540 · 50th
$75,49010th
$99,99025th
$130,54050th
$159,14075th
$181,33090th

That is the medianhalf of people in this occupation in New York earn more.

Table 1 — Adjusted

$130,540 in New York buys what $116,000 buys across the country as a whole.

New York's regional price parity is 112.6 — 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.

Table 2 — Nearby metros

The same job, elsewhere in New York

Adjusted figures apply each metro's regional price parity, so the columns are directly comparable.

Metro areaMedianAdjustedRPPvs. New York
Kiryas Joel$130,710$119,500109.4+3.0%
New York This page$130,540$116,000112.6
Binghamton$105,170$113,30092.9−2.3%
Buffalo$101,880$106,30095.8−8.3%
Albany$100,690$101,10099.6−12.8%
Utica$99,880$107,80092.7−7.1%
Syracuse$97,950$102,30095.7−11.8%
Rochester$97,840$100,80097.0−13.1%

Price parity and difference against New York are in the full table on wider screens.

Table 3 — Employers

Who pays what

Median offered salary from visa filings, which disclose employer, title and exact figure. Government wage surveys never publish at this level.

EmployerMedian offerRangeFilingsvs. metro
Tradeweb Markets$210,000$165k – $250k6+60.9%
Salesforce$185,851$141k – $217k6+42.4%
Meta Platforms$185,000$150k – $227k7+41.7%
Amazon Com Services$181,125$125k – $193k6+38.8%
Jpmorgan Chase$163,300$152k – $225k5+25.1%
Morgan Stanley Services Group$162,000$107k – $170k5+24.1%
Barclays Services$153,000$82k – $225k19+17.2%

Offer ranges and filing counts are in the full table on wider screens.

Fig. 2 — Five-year trend

Nominal against real

The same median, once as published and once restated in 2025 dollars.

100k120k140k160k 20212022202320242025
Nominal, as published Real, in 2025 dollars US$ thousands

Published pay rose 8.5% over the five years to 2025. Adjusted for inflation it fell 8.6% — prices rose faster than pay since 2021. The two lines meet at the right edge by construction, since 2025 is the base year.

Sources

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 54 certified filings across 7 employers.
Inflation
Real figures deflate by CPI-U annual averages (BLS, all items, US city average).
Employment
11,460 employed in this occupation in the metro (BLS estimate; excludes the self-employed).
Occupation
SOC 15-1253, Software Quality Assurance Analysts and Testers. Mapped to our taxonomy as software-quality-assurance-analysts-and-testers.

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.