Tech salaries in Tampa Bay have risen at a higher percentage than in Silicon Valley, according to a new report.
Silicon Valley — which includes San Jose, San Francisco and Oakland and has long been seen as the pinnacle of a tech hub — had salaries rise 5% over the last year, according to the 2023 Dice Tech Salary Report. It still had the highest salaries in the nation, with an average of $144,962. Boston, another large tech hub, followed with an average salary of $130,399. Seattle rounded out the top three, with an average $129,456 salary.
Tampa, in contrast, had an average of $120,900 salary — but had the second-highest increase for tech jobs, with a 19% bump year-over-year. Phoenix was the only city to outpace Tampa, with a 26% salary bump. Portland, Oregon and Columbus, Ohio, each with about 16% increases; and Charlotte, North Carolina with an 11% increase in tech salaries last year.
While Tampa had a large salary jump, Florida as a whole did not follow suit. Arizona continues to be the state with the fastest growth in tech salaries, at 20%, followed by Oregon at 12.3% and Connecticut at 11.2%. The Sunshine State had tech salary growth of 2.7%, or an average salary of $103,375.
The report found that non-traditional areas saw the most significant growth in both tech salaries and workers, "supporting a trend of tech professionals moving away from employment in places like California, and opting for neighboring states, like Arizona."
Nationwide, the average tech salary saw a 2.3% increase in 2022 to $111,348, compared to $108,857 the year prior, according to the report, which was based on survey data gathered by DHI Group Inc., a New York-based employment agency.
Across the board, some of the highest-paying jobs in tech had a strong data component, requiring specialized skills such as the search and analytics engine Elasticsearch ($143,619); Apache Kafka, an open-source distributed event streaming platform ($142,764); Teradata, a multi-cloud data platform ($141,515); and the in-memory data store Redis ($140,290).
Unemployment for technology professionals across all sectors in the U.S. fell to 1.5% in January, as "demand for tech talent remained historically strong throughout the year, especially in more established industries like finance and banking, health care, consulting and aerospace and defense," according to the report.
