Maryland technology workers earn some of the highest salaries in the nation, but the state’s job growth is still lagging behind many of its peers.
The discrepancy between Maryland’s high salaries and job growth is one of the main takeaways from a dive into tech salaries by the tech trade association CompTIA, earlier this month. Maryland ranks seventh in the country for median tech worker salary at $109,357 per year and has a solid base of companies. However, the region's economic growth is lacking, with Greater Baltimore ranking dead last in tech job creation among competing metro areas.
Technology workers earn much higher wages than people in other industries, a gap that has only grown in recent years. In 2022, the average Maryland tech worker earned 132% more than the state’s median salary, up from tech workers earning 87% more than the median salary in 2017, according to CompTIA. Maryland's high salaries lose some of their luster when compared to its neighbors. The District of Columbia ranks second with a median salary of $122,889, and Virginia ranks sixth with a median wage of $109,646. The lowest-paying states for tech workers are South Dakota, Mississippi, Wyoming, Louisiana and West Virginia, which all have a median tech wage of less than $70,000.
Maryland also ranks seventh, behind D.C. and Virginia, in tech worker concentration, with 7.9% of Maryland workers spending their 9-to-5 workdays in the technology sector.
Greater Baltimore technology workers earn just slightly more per year than their counterparts elsewhere in Maryland, pulling in $109,772 a year on average. The region's tech workers enjoy higher salaries than their counterparts in competing metropolitan areas like Nashville, Pittsburgh, and Detroit whose workers earn an average of $77,037, $84,274 and $90,215, respectively.
Maryland also earned high marks for diversity. The report found that 22% of the state’s technology workers are Black, compared to 27% of its total workforce. Baltimore firms have made targeted efforts to improve diversity in recent years through initiatives like Baltimore Tracks, a collective pushing to reduce the gaps between white and Black technology employment by changing the job recruitment process.
Despite these promising metrics, Baltimore and Maryland have struggled to gain new jobs in recent years. The Baltimore area ranked dead last among 51 metro areas for job growth between 2021 and 2022, losing 389 jobs. Maryland did not fare much better. The state ranked 42nd in percentage net job growth, only growing by 1.7%. The stagnation in technology job growth comes despite Baltimore bucking the national trend of a decline in venture capital funding with several megadeals last year and amid increased interest from venture capital firms in local technology companies. D.C. and Virginia rank even lower than Maryland on the job growth list, with D.C. coming in second to last in job growth, despite its high salaries. The fastest-growing state for technology is Nevada, which saw its tech workforce grow by 6.4%.
Jamie McDonald, CEO of UpSurge, a local tech ecosystem builder, said she believes Maryland is starting from a very strong place for job growth, with a lot of big technology companies that pay well, but is still in the early stages of developing a startup ecosystem. Large companies are more likely to reflect the poor overall macroeconomic environment than startups and have a slower growth trajectory, which can help explain the difference between Maryland's high salaries and low job growth, she added.
"We are rapidly adding to the high growth startup economy in a number of our key jurisdictions and that should really cause that [jobs growth] number to shift over time," McDonald said.
The Maryland Technology Development Corp. (TEDCO) wants to turn around some of those metrics with a new “equitech” fund. In a report petitioning the Maryland General Assembly to create the fund, TEDCO pointed to Maryland’s low job growth as the reason increased investment is necessary. TEDCO hopes to push the state to add more manufacturing jobs in order to create more avenues for mass employment that require less education than research and development jobs. The majority of tech jobs in Maryland, 66%, are in the information technology and custom software realms, while manufacturing only makes up 15% of tech employment.
