Salaries: IT project manager

Summarized below are relative salaries for project managers in information technology (IT) with 10-20 years experience. Project management, while not the largest resource cost on an IT initiative, is still an important component in a country’s cost competitiveness in the global IT market.  The cost of project managers is particularly important for smaller projects or outsourcing efforts where the ratio of junior to senior resources is relatively low.

In most countries, experienced project managers are relatively scarce compared to less skilled employees. Therefore the relative cost is higher. For example, in India the salaries of software developers with 1-4 years experience can be 10%-15% of comparable US based resources, while project managers with 10-20 years experience are typically 20%-35% of their US counterparts. This trend holds true across all the large IT services countries including the Philippines and China.

Scarcity of highly talented IT professionals also leads to large variability in compensation. For example, highly talented project managers in Bangalore can command 2 to 3 times the compensation of their less talented countrymen in smaller cities in India.

Data is primarily sourced from PayScale, a leading source on global compensation data. Supplementary data is provided via primary and secondary research by SourcingLine and then converted into an index with US salaries equaling 100.