The average software engineer in Seattle makes $126,000 a year, falling just short of the $134,000 salary Bay Area engineers are expected to rake in.

Share story

Seattle techies are the second-best-paid in the country, according to a report from San Francisco career site Hired.

The average software engineer in Seattle makes $126,000 a year, falling just short of the $134,000 salary Bay Area engineers rake in. Salaries are on the rise: Seattle engineers in 2016 got paid about 2 percent more than in 2015.

The Emerald City bests the Bay Area, though, when cost of living is factored in. With that factor, we fall to the No. 3 spot in the United States, following Denver and Austin, Texas. San Francisco dropped to No. 10 of the 11 major cities in the report.

Newcomers to Seattle get especially good deals. Hired reports that engineers relocating to the area are offered, on average, $2,000 more than people already in the area, presumably as an incentive to move.

Software coding skills have become an increasingly hot commodity as companies spring up around the Seattle area, and the war to hire the best talent has spurred some unusual signing bonuses, like Tesla cars. Coding schools, often called “boot camps,” and co-working spaces are popping up to feed the system.

Hired also looked at how offers break down among different races and ages for candidates in New York and San Francisco. African-American candidates are more likely to get hired than white candidates, Hired data shows, but white candidates are getting much higher salary offers — about $10,000 more.

Hired uses its own data in the study, collected from its work helping companies find job candidates and offering them positions.