Salaries: Senior software engineer/ web developer

Summarized below are relative salaries for senior software engineers/ web developers with 10-20 years experience. The cost of these resources is an important component in a country's cost competitiveness in the IT industry. The cost of senior IT resources is particularly important for complex and smaller projects where the ratio of junior to senior resources is relatively low.

Senior, more experienced personnel are relatively scarce and thus the differential with US and Western European resources is smaller. For example, in India the salaries of junior web developers can be 10%-15% of comparable US based resources, however, more senior resources 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 individuals in IT centers like Bangalore can command 2 to 3 times the compensation of their less talented countrymen in less dynamic locations in India.

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