Trimodal Nature of Tech Compensation in the US, UK and India
Deepdive into the distribution of software engineering compensation, based on more than 20,000 data points from Levels.fyi
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The most-frequently cited article I’ve ever written is still The trimodal nature of software engineering salaries in the Netherlands and Europe – which is a deepdive published back in 2021. At the time, I had recently left my engineering manager job at Uber, and was trying to understand how tech compensation really works. At Uber in Amsterdam, I saw that comp for senior software engineering positions was 2-5x higher than for most “local” senior roles.
To find out why this gap exists, I gathered hundreds of data points and talked with dozens of recruiters and managers; was this comp gap a symptom of “bimodal” distribution, as Daan Luu posted in 2016? After researching, I felt confident enough to say that tech compensation in the Netherlands and Europe was trimodal:
Last year, we returned to this topic in The Trimodal nature of tech compensation revisited, which validated the distribution by using more than 1,000 data points from the Dutch market, and quotes from engineering leaders and software engineers in the US, UK, Canada, and Japan, which suggested that a “trimodal” model is real. Even so, this was partly anecdotal and in need of hard data to confirm it.
Today, we finally have the numbers, thanks to the Levels.fyi team,, and this article dives into the findings by region, covering:
US: entry-level software engineers. Categorizing the three tiers of compensation bands, based on 5,601 data points.
US: senior software engineers. More Tier 2 and 3 offers are at least twice as big as the Tier 1 median, based on 9,509 data points.
Best-paying US companies by tier. Hedge funds, top scaleups, and Big Tech lead the pack – with companies like Roku, MongoDB and Dropbox also ranking high.
UK numbers, tiers, and best-paying companies. Hedge funds and finance companies lead, with Stripe, Confluent, and BP also making it to the top 10, based on 6,219 data points.
India numbers and tiers. Rippling, Stripe, Uber, Coinbase, Atlassian, Broadcom, and LinkedIn, offer ₹1 crore-or-above packages for senior engineers ($118K and up), based on 2,078 data points
Note on equity. Startups and scaleups may offer more in total compensation than publicly traded companies, but equity in not-yet-public companies comes with risk.
The data on the US, UK, and India reveals a complex regional picture united by a trimodal model. See below:
If you want to look even deeper into this topic, check out other detailed articles on tech compensation:
The trimodal nature of software engineering salaries in the Netherlands and Europe (Part 1, 2021)
The trimodal nature of tech compensation revisited (Part 2, 2024)
The trimodal nature of software internship salaries (research by Levels.fyi, 2024)
Thank you to Hakeem Shibly, Zuhayeer Musa, Zaheer Mohiuddin and the Levels.fyi team for sharing massive amounts of data and insights for this deepdive.
Data source
This article uses more than 10,000 compensation data points sourced from Levels.fyi, a compensation comparison site which is great for:
Comparing engineering career levels, such as how E5 at Meta maps to SDE3 at Amazon
Browsing tech comp at large tech companies and scaleups, powered by user submissions
Levels.fyi is powered by a combination of self-reported and verified data points. They offer resume review and salary negotiation services with Big Tech recruiters. A neat feedback loop of this is that information from their salary negotiation services helps the team ensure that submitted data really is valid. Levels.fyi also has a job board and provides compensation benchmarking services for businesses.
Some stats about Levels.fyi:
2.5 million visitors per month
20,000 new data points added per month, on average
$100M: total value of increased comp offers achieved with its compensation negotiation service – not including raises negotiated by candidates using the site ad-hoc for comparison.
A team of 13 people is behind the site and app, and I recently grabbed coffee with several of them in San Francisco.
This article covers “total compensation” (TC), not only salary. TC includes all forms of annual comp:
Base salary
Cash bonus, or the cash bonus target of companies that share this information
Value of equity vested
For example, a $300K TC package might look like this:
$175K base salary
Plus $25K target bonus
Plus $100K in equity vesting over the first year (typically $400K vested over 4 years, with $100K vesting each year)
Equity is a tricky topic but also a key one, more on which is in the “Note on equity” section near the foot of this article.
1. US: entry-level software engineers
Let’s start with entry-level software engineer offers submitted to Levels.fyi in the past year for the world’s biggest tech market. Here’s how these data points were filtered:
“Software Engineer” submissions
Offer date between 1 Jan 2024 and 1 Jan 2025
Years of experience: between 0 and 2
Region: US
Years at company: 0. This means we look at new offers, not existing employees’ comp changes at their current workplaces
We have 5,601 entry-level US data points after applying the filters. A visualization:
At first sight, this distribution fits what looks more like a bimodal distribution, with a first peak at $100-110k, and a second peak at $170-180k:
However, after sifting through the data and manually tagging companies by common traits, we find the data organizes itself differently. The chart below takes the same data and organizes it based on the assumption behind the original trimodal distribution: that companies compensate based on the market they compete in. We use three categories of business type:
Big Tech. Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Netflix, alongside publicly traded, large tech companies competing with them, like Uber, Snap, and Pinterest
Top scaleups and hedge funds. Late-stage startups backed by well-known VCs that have not gone public, or IPOed only very recently. Plus hedge funds, and quantitative trading firms (quant)
Everyone else. startups, privately owned companies, and “traditional” ones
Here’s how the same data looks when broken down into these categories:
Now, let’s check each segment.
Tier 1: Everyone else
This category consists mainly of companies competing for local talent, which often are not driven by their engineering talent or digital products.
This resembles the lowest tier (“Tier 1”) of the trimodal model. It’s interesting how drastically the distribution changes by removing Big Tech, top scaleup, and hedge fund data points!
Tier 2: Big Tech
The largest publicly traded tech companies compensate engineers with increasingly large equity packages up the career ladder. I split this category for two reasons:
Commonly referenced. The terms “FAANG” and “Big Tech” are frequently their own category, and benchmarks for other companies’ offers.
Industry-leading comp. It’s hard to find bigger liquid compensation offers than this group offers. Later, we see it’s possible to win higher illiquid comp offers at not-yet-public scaleups, and some hedge funds can top what Big Tech offers.
Tier 3: Top scaleups and hedge funds
This is a very interesting category with a lack of high-quality data, outside of Levels.fyi, for two reasons:
Private scaleups issue not-yet-liquid equity. Many assume Big Tech companies offer the most, compensation-wise. And this is true in terms of liquid equity; shares that can be sold for cash is an area where Big Tech is near-impossible for scaleups to match.
However, top-tier startups and scaleups can – and do – offer more total compensation than Big Tech. But there’s a catch: their equity cannot be sold until a liquidity event happens like an IPO, or stock buyback. Scaleups which out-offer Big Tech in total comp include Databricks and OpenAI.
It makes sense for late-stage scaleups to make bigger total comp offers than Big Tech because they target the same talent and must compensate for the fact their equity grants are illiquid, and may not become convertible to cash any time soon. Plus, there’s also the risk of a grant losing value like at Foursquare, where employees’ stock options ended up as worthless.
Hedge funds are notoriously secretive. Places like Two Sigma want to keep their compensation details as confidential as possible. Levels.fyi has accurate data points, but not enough to make this group into its own category. So, they’re included with scaleups here.
The compensation philosophy of hedge funds is very different than at Big Tech and scaleups:
No equity: hedge funds do not issue equity, even though this element is almost always what makes Big Tech and scaleup compensation packages standout
Large cash bonuses: instead, hedge funds award hefty end-of-year bonuses, of up to 100% of annual salary. Hedge funds are the only category of company offering more liquid compensation than Big Tech and some scaleups. At the same time, hedge funds hire a lot less frequently
Overlapping categories
Let’s look at all three categories of employer in a single graph:
And also let’s check out the median and 75th percentile total compensation packages of each category:
There are a few interesting points about this distribution:
~2x difference between Tier 1 and 3. Tier 2 and 3 companies pay around 2x as much at the 50th and 75th percentiles than Tier 1 does. Tier 2 (Big Tech) is a lot closer to Tier 3 in TC. The 75th percentile of Tier 1 still doesn’t come close to the 50th percentile of Tier 2
Overlap from Tier 1 into Tier 2. The highest Tier 1 offers – at around the 90th-95th percentiles – do reach up to $200K, which is near the median range of tiers 2 and 3
Tiers 2 and 3 overlap a lot. The only real difference between Tier 2 and Tier 3 is that there are much more Big Tech data points in the sample. This could indicate a bias in user submissions towards Big Tech, or that scaleups and hedge funds hire far fewer entry-level engineers in the US
2. US: senior software engineers
Compensation differences tend to grow with seniority, so let’s look at senior-and-above software engineers by adjusting the filters:
“Software Engineer” submissions
Offer date in the last 3 years (between 1 Jan 2022 and 1 Jan 2025)
Experience: 5 years minimum
Region: US
Years at company: 0. Similar to before, we only look at new offers
Let’s see how the same three categories map when looking at senior software engineers, split across the same tiers:
Here’s what these tiers look like in the median and 75th percentile compensation bands:
The tiers are more distinct for seniors than for entry-level engineers. Some observations:
Tier 1 (everyone else): this category has the most data points (53% of the total). Also, while the median of this tier is significantly below the other two categories, there is overlap at the 75th and 90th percentiles. Simply put, it’s possible to earn as much in this group as in Big Tech, but it’s harder to do.
Tier 2 (Big Tech): compensation spread is very wide, starting from around $100K, all the way to $600K and above. This indicates the median value is less important, and things like career level, the specific company, and negotiation, could all matter more.
Tier 3 (top scaleups and hedge funds): this overlaps with Big Tech, and its top end goes even further. Also, there is far less data for this category, suggesting that these companies hire significantly fewer staff than Big Tech does, as mentioned above.
Outliers: these are much more distinct at the senior level, compared to the entry-level tier distribution
Big Tech and scaleups+hedge funds have many outliers. The median entry-level Tier 1 compensation package was $105K – and there were few offers in tiers 2 and 3 that offered twice as much ($200K and above.) The median senior Tier 1 compensation was $180K, but now there are far more offers in tiers 1 and 2 worth double that ($350K and above). Visualized:
3. US companies paying highest by tier
With the data below, we look at the number of senior software engineer submissions and filter them for offers submitted by engineers with 5-10 years of experience.
Tier 1: “everyone else”
The highest median total compensation offers in this category were made by the companies listed below:
Leading employers in this category are Indeed, HubSpot, Workday, Disney, eBay, Capital One, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Visa.
Which businesses in each tier are most worth targeting for jobseekers? One indicator is the number of submissions, which identifies companies that are hiring more than others. Of course, this also biases to companies which users have shared data about. In this category, it’s Capital One, Walmart, JPMorgan Chase, Disney, HubSpot, Indeed, Workday, Palo Alto Networks, Fidelity, and Visa.
Tier 2: Big Tech
Highest-paying companies by median total compensation:
This is quite a jump: the median is nearly twice as high as in the “everyone else” category! You can find more details about individual packages and get a sense of the spread of offers per company, at the pages for Netflix, Airbnb, Pinterest, Robinhood, Snap, Roku, Meta, MongoDB, Uber and Dropbox.
Most data points submitted: for this category, most data points submitted were for Amazon, Meta, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, Uber, Block, NVIDIA, and Salesforce.
Tier 3: Top scaleups and hedge funds
The cream of the comp crop; with hedge funds, quant firms, and top-tier VC-backed startups doing well. Companies with the highest median offers are:
If you thought Big Tech has high median offers, these numbers are between 20 and 40% bigger. Hudson River Trading, Citadel, and Jane Street, are all hedge funds or quant firms, meaning their stated compensation is all cash. Others on the list are companies which IPOed in recent years like Coupang, or late-stage scaleups.
Find more details about individual packages and get a sense of the spread of offers within a company by checking the respective pages on Levels.fyi of Hudson River Trading, Databricks, Coupang, Citadel, OpenAI, OpenSea, Earnin, Nuro and Figma.
Most data points submitted: in this category, it’s Bytedance, Stripe, Cruise, Snowflake, Roblox, Coinbase, Databricks, Reddit, Rivian, and Anduril.
The importance of location
Location also impacts compensation packages. In the Bay Area, Seattle and New York, compensation packages are higher than in other areas in the US. We can get a better sense of how location plays a part using a heatmap – also built by Levels.fyi:
4. UK numbers and tiers
Here’s the distribution of compensation data points for senior software engineers in the UK, mapped in British pound sterling (GBP):
For this country, we attempt to segment data points by company-headquarter location:
Headquartered outside the UK and US (mostly in European countries)
Headquarters in the UK
Companies with headquarters in the US
Here’s data for these categories:
Visualizing the distribution:
A few interesting things stand out:
The “US-HQ tier” is odd. It feels like two tiers might be coupled here, based on the midpoint of the graph having several local maximums: £100K ($126K), around £125K ($158K), and circa £150K ($190K). I’d assume that if we split up Big Tech, the top scaleups+hedge funds, and everyone else, we’d see two distinct tiers. Still, it is US-HQ’d companies that offer the most comp to senior software engineers.
Like the US, the UK has hedge funds that offer as much – or more – than Big Tech. These firms are all based in London, often with offices in New York. This is the first time I’ve seen it broken down like this.
UK, but not US or UK-headquartered, are similar. The medians and 75th percentiles of these categories are almost the same. Non-US, non-UK HQed companies simply have fewer data points.
The data is likely to overrepresent US-HQ’d companies. It would seem there are more US-based companies employing software engineers in the UK, than UK-headquartered ones do. However, based on my understanding of the market this is incorrect: in reality, a lot more UK-based companies employ software engineers than US-based ones, but the data currently biases towards US-HQ’d companies.
My sense is that for the UK, the real three tiers are those previously discussed:
Tier 1: local market, meaning most UK HQ’d companies
Tier 2: startups and scaleups targeting the top of the local market. Many are likely US-based, but not competing with Big Tech
Tier 3: Big Tech and top scaleups competing with them
Here are companies offering the highest median total compensation in the UK:
Businesses paying the most, based on median data: Citadel, The Trade Desk, Balyasny Asset Management, Stripe, Confluent, Qube Research, Maven Securities, Millennium, G-Research, and BP – an oil and gas company, which is the only non-tech, non-finance company in the top 10.
And here are companies outside the top 10, but in in the top 30:
Coremont (£180K), Meta (£178K), Apple (£178K), Snap (£177K), Reddit (£176K), ByteDance (£175K), Palantir (£173K), Google (£173K), HashiCorp (£169K)
Standard Chartered (£166K), WordQuant (£166K), BBC (£165K), DuckDuckGo (£161K), Monday.com (£159K), Squarepoint Capital (£157K), Samsara (£156K), Onfido (£156K), X – formerly Twitter (£156K), Discovery (£154K)
In this list, a surprise for me was to see the BBC being so competitive in compensation, compared to Big Tech companies. In all fairness, I’ve heard good things about both the engineering talent and the engineering culture at the British broadcaster.
And these are the companies in the UK for which the most data points were submitted by users:
5. India numbers and tiers
For India, compensation packages are represented in USD ($100K in USD equals to about ₹87 lakhs). The split:
This split mirrors a single distribution, but let’s break it up by the location of headquarters:
In India
Not in India or the US
US
The distribution:
It feels like US HQ’d companies might be two tiers combined, so let’s split this out by separating US-based Big Tech, and US-based “everyone else”:
There are many interesting details in this graph:
The data is US-dominated. As in the UK, India has more local companies based in the country and employing software engineers. For example, Tata Consultancy services alone employs more than 600,000 IT professionals – many of them software engineers. And we’ve not covered large employers like Infosys, or Wipro. At the same time, data from Levels.fyi is biased towards US-HQ’d companies: 77% of all data points. You can help the data become more accurate by submitting your compensation.
India-HQ’d companies rarely offer standout compensation. As per this data, it is mostly companies headquartered abroad that offer above $100K in total compensation (₹87 lakhs or more).
US-HQ’d companies pay very well. While the median compensation for these companies is $63K (₹52 lakh,) the 90th percentile is at $133K (₹1.1 crore!) This is surprisingly high!
Big Tech offers are very strong. A select few senior+ engineers can make in the range of $200K per year (₹1.7 crore) at the very top of the range, which is close to 4x the median compensation of the India-HQ’d tier.
Companies that pay the most in India, as per the data:
One surprise is Google not making the top 10; it comes in at number 14 overall, with median senior engineer compensation at $98K (₹85 lakh) – not far away from the top 10. One thing to keep in mind is that Google has the most data points of companies, meaning it might be more accurate.
Businesses with the most data points submitted in India:
6. Note on equity
The bigger a Big Tech or VC-funded startup comp package is, the larger the share of equity. For example, here’s a visualization of the comp split for senior software engineers in the US, over the past year:
You might wonder how the largest packages have no equity component and a very large cash bonus. It’s because these are hedge funds which don’t issue equity and award cash bonuses of nearly 2x the annual salary.
Non-liquid equity comes with additional risk. Let’s take two compensation packages: one with a TC of $475K, and one with $423K. Which is better? It seems like $475K is clearly bigger, but some extra context is needed. The $240K package is from Rippling, a scaleup that is not yet publicly traded:
The $423K package is from Uber:
The big difference between them is that at Uber, an engineer can sell their stock as soon as it vests, (usually, quarterly) if they wish. By doing so, they earn $423K worth of liquid compensation in the first year. At Rippling, the liquid compensation will be $335K ($240K in base salary and $85K bonus target), and equity can only be sold if and when a liquidity event occurs, such as:
Rippling organizes a secondary offer and allows employees to sell some stock. This usually happens with oversubscribed fundraising events
Rippling goes public. In this case, employees can sell their vested stock after a lockup period of around 6 months
Rippling is acquired and the buyer pays for employees’ stocks
For private companies, the big questions are when will equity become liquid, and how much will it be worth.
It’s worth remembering stock prices change, which makes equity compensation volatile. In 2022, we covered how this can lead to compensation woes. At the time, tech stocks like Stitch Fix, Redfin, and Zoom, dropped 50-80% in 12 months. At the same time, companies like NVIDIA, Tesla, and Apple, saw 50-100% stock price growth. Compensation packages for people working in the former group dropped significantly, while the latter group saw major increases. A $350K TC package became worth $510K at NVIDIA, and $231K at Stitch Fix:
Takeaways
Thanks very much to the Levels.fyi team for sharing so much data for the US, UK, and India. It’s enabled us to visualize compensation distribution and tiers across international labor markets.
Levels.fyi gives free access to its compensation data points, and relies on users sharing their comp numbers. If you’ve gotten value out of this article, please consider submitting the comp details of your current position; this lets the site provide fresh, data-backed insights, like in this deepdive.
My biggest takeaways:
The US is unique in having a tier above Big Tech. Across the UK, India, and in the Netherlands, the highest compensation tier (Tier 3) is Big Tech. So it’s a surprise to learn there’s an even higher tier that exists only in the US. Hedge funds, quant firms, and top scaleups can pay more than the likes of Google, Meta, Amazon, Netflix, Apple, etc, with two important caveats:
At top scaleups, bigger-than-Big-Tech comp packages are usually reserved for workers already in Big Tech, who would not switch jobs for an illiquid TC package unless it exceeds their current, liquid one.
Hedge funds and quant firms seem like a different world. Switching between Big Tech and these companies looks harder to do, and happens less often than moving between Big Tech and scaleups.
US-HQ’d companies tend to pull up markets outside the US. Among tier 3 companies in the Netherlands, 95% of those which I know are US-headquartered, and the data shows this is also the case in the UK and India.
Higher-tier companies come with downsides. These workplaces pay more, but usually operate with a “Silicon Valley-style” engineering culture: they expect a lot more in terms of autonomy, taking on product, DevOps, and testing work, and working longer hours – especially when collaborating with overseas teams. Adjusting to this can be tough if you’ve never worked in such an environment. Vice-versa, it can also be challenging to swap this pattern for a more traditional, hierarchical workplace.
Meanwhile, work stress can actually be higher at Tier 2 and Tier 3 companies, as covered in part 2 of the Trimodal series.
Today’s job market is a lot tougher than previously, and it’s harder to get into top-tier companies. In this deepdive, we’ve looked closely at the top tiers across several markets. With the job market tightening up, there are more qualified candidates than ever, and this can affect the size of offers. So, if you’re in the job market, I would not treat the numbers in this article as concrete and immovable. Instead, just focus on performing well in interviews, and getting an offer. Then these figures might be helpful in the negotiation phase.
Compensation is not everything; it’s just what is easiest to measure and make comparisons with, but there’s more to a job than the pay alone. Here’s what I used to think matters:
But is this all there is? I no longer think so. Other factors also make a job into a dream or a daily struggle:
If you’ve gotten value out of this data-based article, why not contribute to the wealth of knowledge about global tech compensation by anonymously sharing your current compensation with Levels.fyi. I hope you’ve found the additional data points useful, especially the expanded details on the US, UK, and India.
For more on tech comp, check out other deepdives:
The trimodal nature of software internship salaries (research by Levels.fyi, 2024)
The trimodal nature of software engineering salaries in the Netherlands and Europe (Part 1, 2021)
The trimodal nature of tech compensation revisited (Part 2, 2024)
Insightful as always! 🙌🏻
There's also another interesting thing that I've noticed, in recent years, among Indian/Pakistani SSE's (and in my circle of friends) in their preference to move to UAE (or more recently KSA) from EU. Their argument is that they get similar or more salary compared to EU but without the tax deductions and of course being closer to their home country as well.
^Perhaps this can be another data point for collection in future compensation related deep dives!
Central Europe perspective: working in US-BigTech pays much better, but limits opportunities to grow into management/leads/architect etc. positions - as these are usually kept for US-based folks.