IT salary guides, technology compensation benchmarks, and pay trend analysis — helping employers set competitive offers and helping IT professionals understand their market value across roles, experience levels, and US metro areas.
By Tom Kenaley, Senior Partner and President, KORE1 As of October 16, 2026, a mid-level contract network engineer bills $95 to $120 an hour nationally, median $106, or about $55,300 for three months. A mid-level systems administrator bills $70 to $90, median $79. Both are W2 bill rates through a staffing firm, from the KORE1 … Read more
By Tom Kenaley, Senior Partner and President, KORE1 As of October 16, 2026, mid-level contract IT consultants bill $75 to $95 an hour for ERP, NetSuite, and Salesforce, $90 to $116 for security, $98 to $122 for data engineering, and $72 to $93 for project management nationally. Those are hourly staffing bill rates for a … Read more
By Mike Carter, Managing Director, KORE1 Most Guidewire developers in the U.S. are paid $110,000 to $140,000 base at mid-level in 2026 and $140,000 to $175,000 at senior, and technical architects go from $170,000 to $215,000. The averages you find online disagree by about $40,000, because each one is quietly measuring a different group of … Read more
By Tom Kenaley, President and Senior Partner, KORE1 An AI agent engineer in the U.S. earns $155,000 to $210,000 in base pay at mid-level and $210,000 to $290,000 at senior in 2026, and what the agent is allowed to change moves the number more than years do. Staff and lead engineers start near $290,000 base. … Read more
By Jennifer Burdick, Recruiting Manager, KORE1 Informatica developers earn $95,000 to $210,000 in 2026, with maintenance-only PowerCenter work at the bottom of that range and PowerCenter-to-IDMC migration leads at the top. The gap is not seniority. It is which side of the migration the work sits on, and most reqs are still priced as though … Read more
By Tom Kenaley, President and Senior Partner, KORE1 In 2026 a SOC analyst’s base salary runs from about $58,000 for a new Tier 1 hire to roughly $145,000 for an experienced Tier 3, with most Tier 2 investigators paid $80,000 to $110,000. The $129,180 figure most salary pages quote is the federal median for every … Read more
By Mike Carter, Managing Director, KORE1 A project manager in the United States earns a median of $102,320 a year, going by Bureau of Labor Statistics wage data from May 2025, and half the field lands between $78,440 and $133,100. What most salary pages leave out is industry. The same federal job code pays a … Read more
By Jennifer Burdick, Recruiting Manager, KORE1 Splunk engineers earn $99,000 to $209,000 in 2026, with SIEM-focused Splunk Security Engineers averaging $152,773 and general infrastructure-facing roles closer to $147,524. The title on the req decides which number you’re budgeting for, and a lot of companies pick the wrong one before the posting ever goes live. A … Read more
By Mike Carter, Director of Partnership Success, KORE1 Embedded software engineers earn $125,000 to $150,000 at mid-level and $155,000 to $205,000 at senior in 2026, base only. Published US averages for the title run from $91,755 to $174,754. That $83,000 gap between two averages is the reason bands get approved that nobody accepts. Four different … Read more
By Robert Ardell, Co-Founder and Strategic Advisor, KORE1 Automation engineer salaries in 2026 run roughly $72,000 to $162,000 depending on platform depth, industry, and hours, with published US averages clustering between $88,000 and $123,000. The spread is not noise. It is eight published figures measuring at least three different jobs, and not one of them … Read more
