Tech Salaries Heat Up: Tampa Bay Outpaces Silicon Valley in Salary Growth

According to the recently released 2023 Dice Tech Salary Report, tech salaries in Tampa Bay have grown at a higher percentage than those in Silicon Valley. While Silicon Valley continues to be known as the pinnacle of tech hubs, it had only a 5% increase in tech salaries in the last year, reaching an average of $144,962 - still the highest in the nation. Boston followed closely with an average salary of $130,399, and Seattle with an average of $129,456.

In contrast, Tampa Bay's average salary was $120,900 but had the second-highest increase for tech jobs, with a 19% bump year-over-year. Phoenix was the only city to outpace Tampa Bay with a 26% salary increase. Portland, Oregon, and Columbus, Ohio, each had about a 16% increase, and Charlotte, North Carolina, had an 11% increase in tech salaries in the previous year.

The report revealed that non-traditional tech areas saw the most significant growth in both tech salaries and workers, indicating a trend of tech professionals moving away from employment in places like California and opting for neighboring states, like Arizona.

Despite the large salary jump in Tampa Bay, 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%. Florida had tech salary growth of 2.7%, with an average salary of $103,375.

The report also highlighted that nationwide, the average tech salary increased by 2.3% in 2022 to $111,348, compared to $108,857 in the previous year. The highest-paying jobs in tech required specialized skills, including the search and analytics engine Elasticsearch, Apache Kafka, an open-source distributed event streaming platform, Teradata, a multi-cloud data platform, and the in-memory data store Redis.

In January 2023, unemployment for technology professionals across all sectors in the U.S. fell to 1.5%. The report attributed this to the strong demand for tech talent, especially in more established industries like finance and banking, health care, consulting, and aerospace and defense.

Overall, the 2023 Dice Tech Salary Report provides valuable insights into the tech industry's current trends and offers an informative resource for tech professionals and employers alike.