It’s a rough time out there, and the turbulence we’ve all experienced over the last few years continues. While the 2024 SF Ben Developer Survey found that 54% of Salesforce Developers were satisfied with their jobs and another 35% were neutral, the 2024-25 Salesforce Salary Survey found that they feel differently about their pay.
Despite satisfaction with work, a slight majority of developers, 51.9%, believe their salary is not fair and equal compared to others in their role. Even more, 63.3% are unsatisfied with their pay increase process.
So, there is discontent about compensation amongst developers, which doesn’t make them unique among tech workers (or any workers). But let’s dig in to find out more about this discontent, understand where developers may still be finding satisfaction, and look to the future to understand how that may impact the developer work landscape in the coming months and years.
Do you feel your salary is fair and equal compared to others in your role?
| Yes | 48.1% |
| No | 51.9% |
Are you satisfied with the current salary increase process at your company?
| Yes | 36.7% |
| No | 63.3% |
Note: The salary survey data for this article, unless otherwise stated, consists solely of the subset of responses from individuals who selected “Developer” in response to the question, “Which title is the closest to your current role?”. There are several other titles adjacent or similar to developers, such as “DevOps Engineer”, “Technical Consultant”, or “Technical Delivery”. If these are included in any analysis, we will note it as necessary.
Average Salesforce Developer Salaries
The following salary figures represent the average salaries for Salesforce Developers, based on our recent survey of over 3,500 respondents across 95 countries and more than 20 industries. Of these, 587 respondents identified as Developers, while 219 identified as Technical Consultants.
DevOps Engineers and Technical Delivery accounted for 10 and 11 responses respectively, which likely constitute too few responses from either group to draw conclusions.
If you would like the full readout for all roles – including junior, intermediate, senior, and director-level positions – please download the report.
North America
| Junior (less than 2 years) | Intermediate (3-5 years) | Senior (5+ years) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| US ($) | $78,066 | $109,580 | $165,543 |
| Canada (C$) | – | $104,000 | $134,616 |
Europe
| Junior (less than 2 years) | Intermediate (3-5 years) | Senior (5+ years) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| UK (£) | £36,400 | £57,000 | £79,046 |
| France (€) | €33,350 | €34,583 | €53,333 |
| Germany (€) | €53,000 | €64,333 | €79,428 |
| Spain (€) | €27,666 | €39,087 | €59,728 |
| Netherlands (€) | €32,000 | €53,400 | €80,500 |
Asia and Oceania
| Junior (less than 2 years) | Intermediate (3-5 years) | Senior (5+ years) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Australia (AU$) | – | $117,000 | $242,600 |
| India (INR₹) | ₹411,007 | ₹1,110,248 | ₹3,543,632 |
| Philippines (PHP₱) | ₱300,000 | ₱1,668,000 | ₱2,624,500 |
Key Factors Influencing Salesforce Developer Salaries
Many things affect how salaries are decided. When you start a job, your pay depends on several factors. Naturally, a higher starting salary improves your earning potential long term as percent-based pay rises compound from that original amount. Let’s look at some of these factors that can impact salary.
- Experience
- Going Broad or Deep
- Location and Industry
- Type of Employer (SI, End Customer, ISV)
- Negotiation
1. Experience
The longer you’ve been in work, the higher value you provide your employer. Naturally, this means more experience, more years on the job, more projects delivered, and more lines of code checked in will all mean you can command a higher salary.
2. Going Broad or Deep
Experience and reputation all accrue over time. As your career progresses, you may come to a crossroads where you have the opportunity to fan out and broaden your skills or embrace and go deep into a skill set. Whichever you choose, each is still an asset to the right developer team. Deep specialization in an in-demand or scarce skill set can be a big benefit. Tech is always changing, so a demonstrated track record of versatility can also be valuable.
3. Location and Industry
Where you live impacts your wages. But wages tend to be higher in places where the cost of living is higher in the first instance. This is true both within countries and between different countries. But moving countries today to gain an advantage could be tricky with costs of living being high relative to salaries.
4. Type of Employer
As a developer working with Salesforce, the actual relationship between your employer and Salesforce will impact the salary you can command. There are four broad categories:
- End-customer
- System integrator
- Independent software vendor (ISV)
- Freelancer/self-employed/solopreneur
Once again, geography impacts this number, but in many cases, which type of employer you work for will either grow or shrink your earning potential.
5. Negotiation
The salary you start at greatly impacts your earning potential for as long as you have a job. Since salary increases are percentage-driven in the vast majority of cases, the higher you start, the faster your wages grow. In fact, 70% of responses state a pay rise of 10% or less, with half being below 5%.
As for frequency, raises occur once or twice a year for 75% of our respondents. However, a full 25% report either infrequent or no pay increases in their current jobs.
How you negotiate is within your control. To have the best chance at the highest salary for your current skill level, always wait to enter formal negotiations until after you’ve been offered a job, and always ask for more than you think you’ll get. If your new employer has to haggle you down, you’re on the right track. But also know your bottom line and be willing to walk away from a job that doesn’t pay what the market will support.
How to Increase Your Salesforce Developer Salary
If you want to increase your salary, this section is for you. Here are nine ways to increase your salary:
1. Build Seniority and Show Results
Results matter. Working to deliver code and having projects under your belt is the best way to show that you are a productive part of a development team. The data from the survey clearly shows a linear relationship between seniority and salary.
Obviously, you can’t synthesize experience. But if you’re new to software development, knowing the role of experience can help you understand if you’re not yet earning what you hope you would. This is especially true in the current job climate. It’s been a challenging two years in tech and doesn’t look to be getting any easier in the near term.
Everywhere I go, I hear developers expressing concern about an existential threat to developer jobs on account of generative AI. There’s no doubt the work has already changed and will continue to do so, but the current state of AI code generation seems to be a long way from reliably solving complex problems. This is especially true with making targeted changes or improvements to complex existing code bases. But learning to work effectively with AI tools has become the new must-have skill for developers.
As for showing results, coders have great ways to do this. Presenting at local developer groups, writing blog posts, and creating or collaborating on open source projects are all great ways to take your expertise and make it public. Not everyone has the time or ability to devote to these (and let’s not pretend these don’t take meaningful amounts of time). Not everyone wants to be a hobbyist coder in their off-hours either. But if you can – and want to – it can be a great way to get noticed.
2. Move Jobs
Your boss won’t want me to say this, but for a long time, studies have shown that a person changing jobs and employers several times during their career will experience more wage growth than a person staying at the same job or company. The latest study from the UK Office of National Statistics in 2021 clearly shows that consistently, year over year workers who have changed jobs experience greater wage growth. Similar outcomes can be found in studies focused on the USA and other countries.
This holds true even in times of economic difficulty, although the boost you may get could be lower than when the economy is really on fire.
A change in jobs gives you an opportunity to negotiate from square one, using the experience and wins you’ve collected. This gives you a chance to improve more than your wages. In fact, the survey reveals that compensation ranked third behind work-life balance and career growth opportunities when asking what the most important factor is when considering a job for developers. If your current employer lacks these, start looking for employers that do better at these measures. Use the security of the job you have to grow your career to the job you want.
There are two important potential negative factors to this tendency: frequency and involuntary job changes. Changing jobs too frequently can signal a lack of loyalty, performance problems or other characteristics that employers may flag (rightly or wrongly) as undesirable. And if you’ve lost a job, if you’re under financial pressure to find new employment, this can undermine the strength of your negotiating position to command a greater salary.
3. Location
As highlighted earlier, geography and the local economy impact salary. However, simply moving to another city, region, or country where you can command a higher salary does not automatically lead to greater prosperity. But if you can move and bring a higher salary to a region with a lower cost of living, this can be a great opportunity to gain an advantage. This is called geographic arbitrage.
Looking at the countries with the most responses on the survey, we’ve compared salaries (converted to USD) with cost of living data from Numbeo using the US cost of living as a baseline. There’s a lot to potentially dig into. However, looking just at the relationship between the cost of living and salary, it’s clear that just moving to a country with a higher salary doesn’t guarantee a better standard of living. The same goes for changing cities or regions.
4. Industry
Industry is another factor that comes to bear in how you’re paid. But this is another complex factor. The survey data suggests that the country you live in impacts which industry pays better. In many countries, this also depends on specific regions and cities, too, such as different states in the USA. Let’s see some examples.
Looking at the USA and India, salaries across industries…
Salary by Industry (USA)
| Technology | $189,041 |
| Banking and Financial Services | $146,977 |
| Professional Services | $141,875 |
| Public Sector | $121,055 |
| Automotive | $120,796 |
| Education | $117,250 |
| Engineering, Construction, and Real Estate | $114,013 |
| Healthcare | $112,750 |
| Nonprofit | $105,406 |
Salary by Industry (India)
| Banking and Financial Services | $53,579 |
| Professional Services | $32,259 |
| Technology | $27,755 |
| Retail | $25,719 |
| Healthcare | $22,289 |
Then, to compare two European countries, the UK and Spain also show differences in which industries pay best.
Salary by Industry (UK)
| Banking and Financial Services | $115,358 |
| Retail | $107,539 |
| Technology | $102,997 |
| Healthcare | $89,973 |
| Energy and Utilities | $73,264 |
| Nonprofit | $71,978 |
| Media and Entertainment | $67,480 |
| Manufacturing | $46,786 |
Salary by Industry (Spain)
| Banking and Financial Services | $62,053 |
| Automotive | $59,541 |
| Travel, Transportation, and Hospitality | $54,129 |
| Professional Services | $51,242 |
| Energy and Utilities | $50,881 |
| Technology | $44,602 |
| Agricultural | $32,477 |
| Education | $22,734 |
We don’t have enough data to offer guidance for every country. This data is also incomplete and only includes industries for the responses we had in each country. The point every developer should take away is that this data suggests that making a move to a different industry to improve your pay is highly dependent on your local market. Look for local data sources to understand where you can maximize your salary.
5. Nurture ‘In-Demand’ Skills
Growing your experience with a specific product, technology, or feature can be a positive pressure on your pay. This is especially true if the skill is in demand. Globally, the five highest-paying Salesforce skills we found were:
- Tableau
- Quip
- Einstein
- Salesforce Industries
- Heroku
It may seem counterintuitive, but product retirement can actually increase demand. The long tail effect of technology, where technologies continue to be used by the end-customer once adopted and integrated into their workflow, can create higher demand for experts as technologies are sunsetted. Once a product is no longer active, many developers will move on to keep up with newer technologies. Those that remain can become in high demand for the remaining users of that product. It may not be the sexiest tech to work with, but riding out the long tail can pay off.
The point is to consider both the popularity of the tech and the scarcity of skills when deciding what ‘in-demand’ looks like.
6. Explore Public Cloud
Interestingly, there is also data to suggest that investing in public cloud skills is becoming a factor in being able to command a higher salary. Developers with AWS as a skill showed up at the high end of responses compared to other skills. Two years ago, I offered my advice to everyone to look into building public cloud computing skills as a supplement to Salesforce skills. Sure enough, when averaging the pay of people based on individual skills, AWS shows up as the fourth highest single skill.
| Tableau | $138,344 |
| Quip | $120,150 |
| Einstein | $117,111 |
| AWS | $112,788 |
| Salesforce Industries | $109,874 |
Public cloud is how software is built today. So much so that in Hyperforce, it runs a large part of Salesforce’s infrastructure today. It is never a bad time for anyone in technology to invest in building public cloud skills or certifications.
7. Get a Certification
When it comes to other Salesforce careers, certifications seem to correlate to higher salaries. The more certifications you get, the higher the salary you can command. For developers, it is less clear if certifications can boost their earnings.
The data suggests that, generally early in your career (five years or less), having at least one certification can improve your salary. In some countries, for certain slices, the data suggests some possible correlation, such as in India, for developers with three to five years of experience with Salesforce, having more certifications equated to higher salaries.
If you’re working at a Salesforce partner that needs to keep a certain number of certified employees on the books to maintain their status, it’s reasonable to assume that having a certification may give you better leverage in your salary negotiations.
In our responses, 87.4% of developers hold at least one Salesforce certification. Two-thirds hold some non-Salesforce certification. Clearly, individuals find value in having them. But whether it helps in actually increasing your earnings, well, the data just doesn’t seem to bear that out apart from a few narrow instances.
8. Consider Career Path
When we get our first jobs, it’s easy to look no further than that job, that salary, and the perks that are on offer. A great way to improve your earning potential as a developer long term is to consider a career path. A good question to start with is, “Where will you be in 10 years?”.
One option is engineering management. And certainly, moving into engineering management is a great way to increase your salary. Compared to a senior developer (over five years of experience), managers make between 10-30% more, depending on the region.
Another option available is to look for employers that have career paths for individual contributor developers, which go into director and VP-level salary bands. While probably not common in an end-customer’s IT applications team, many Silicon Valley companies have these career paths.
“Staff Engineer” or “Principal Engineer” can equate to director-level salary bands. “Distinguished Engineer”, “Engineering Fellow”, or “Chief Engineer” can often mean VP-level salary. Not everyone gets to these kinds of roles. But if you love the work and want to progress in your career but don’t want to be a people manager, you may want to find prospective employers that have such a career path.
9. The Architect Way
In the past five years, transitioning to an architect role has become more and more common. Community efforts like Ladies Be Architects, private training programs, and the Well-Architected team have evangelized the value that architects bring to Salesforce teams and created paths of enablement to learn architect skills and mindset.
Becoming an architect can also be valuable to you. In most geographies, solution architects and technical architects out-earn their developer counterparts. The premium varies greatly. In North America (excluding Mexico), a solution architect earns a 15% premium and a technical architect a 26% premium over a developer role. But in Europe, you can get a 75% bump in salary to move to solution architect and more than double your salary as a technical architect. In India, a solution architect earns double that of a developer and a technical architect earns more than triple.
Salary Breakdown – Worldwide Regions
| Role | North America | Europe | Oceania | Middle East | South America | Asia |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Developer | $138,709 | $58,954 | $139,767 | $62,323 | $26,717 | $19,507 |
| Solution Architect | $160,371 | $103,372 | $114,367 | $56,596 | $59,899 | $43,710 |
| Technical Architect | $174,803 | $122,000 | $109,938 | $124,736 | $49,071 | $70,316 |
I would caution against taking on becoming an architect just for the title. It does mean different work. And if you like working with and shipping code, it may not be quite what you think. But if you work well at the intersection of big technical, organizational, and people problems, skilling up to be a technical architect or solution architect could not only bring you a higher salary but present unique challenges beyond pushing bytes around.
Summary
Pinning down salary is no easy task. By looking at the survey, I hope you’ve gotten a better picture of the factors at play and how they interact. In the end, geography, the local economy, and your experience are always the biggest factors that affect pure earning power. However, there is a lot at play that you can control to get the most out of your local economy. Knowing which levers you have available to pull can give you the best chance at maximizing your earnings.
And don’t forget, salary isn’t the only factor in a good quality of life. Knowing your own priorities can help you determine whether a slightly higher salary is worth it or if taking slightly lower pay with other benefits will suit you in the long run.
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