Last updated: November 11, 2026
By Jennifer Burdick, Recruiting Manager, KORE1
A C# developer in the United States earns about $100,000 to $114,000 in base pay in 2026, according to Payscale, ZipRecruiter, and Talent.com, and Glassdoor’s median total pay reaches $123,000. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median for all software developers at $135,980. Each page counts a different group of people, and none of them says which group, so this guide lays the sources side by side and works out the dollar gaps between them.
By the time a C# requisition reaches my desk at KORE1 it already carries a salary figure, copied from whatever page a search engine returned first. So this week I read five sources back to back and wrote down what each one claims. Three report base pay for a C# title. Payscale says $99,718 and Talent.com says $113,563, which is $13,845 apart for one job title on two sites people trust. Neither is a typo.
Start with the conflict of interest. KORE1 gets paid when a C# developer we introduced accepts an offer and starts, so I would rather your band be right before the search opens than wrong after it stalls. We run a C# developer staffing desk for backend, Unity, and desktop teams. Every number below comes from a page I link, so check my math without calling me.
C# Developer Salary by Source
C# developer salary is the base pay an employer offers a person who writes and maintains software in C# on the .NET platform, from ASP.NET Core services and Azure functions to Unity games and WPF desktop clients. Read every figure in the table as base pay unless the last column says otherwise.
| Source | What it reports | Read it with this in mind |
|---|---|---|
| Payscale, C# Developer, updated July 23, 2026 | Average base $99,718. The 10th percentile is $52,000, the median is about $100,000, and the 90th percentile is $157,000 | Built from 47 salary profiles, the smallest sample in this table |
| Talent.com, C# developer, 2026 | Median $113,563 from 10,000 salaries. Low $91,773, high $148,748 | The page does not say what its low and high mean, so do not read them as percentiles |
| ZipRecruiter, C# .NET developer, as of November 11, 2026 | Average $109,892. The 25th to 75th percentile runs $97,500 to $124,500, and the 90th percentile is $137,500 | Estimated from active job postings. The page also shows a floor of $39,000 and a ceiling of $169,000 |
| Glassdoor, C Sharp Developer, 2026 | Median total pay $123,000. Total pay runs $97,000 to $157,000 and base runs $88,000 to $140,000 | Total pay includes $9,000 to $17,000 of additional pay on top of base |
| Glassdoor, .NET Developer, 2026 | Median total pay $141,000. Total pay runs $118,000 to $171,000 and base runs $97,000 to $132,000 | Additional pay runs $21,000 to $39,000, so total and base sit far apart on this page |
| BLS, software developers, May 2025 | Median annual wage $135,980 | Every software developer in the country, not C# alone. BLS has no category for a language |
The three base pay estimates for the C# title sit within $13,845 of each other, with Payscale at the bottom and Talent.com at the top. Glassdoor and BLS run higher, and the reason shows on the page. Glassdoor counts bonus and other pay, and BLS counts every kind of software developer.
Glassdoor’s two pages describe one language. The .NET Developer page shows a median total pay $18,000 above the C Sharp Developer page, and its additional pay is more than double, $21,000 to $39,000 against $9,000 to $17,000. Glassdoor gives no explanation for the gap, and I have none to offer.
Salary.com is missing on purpose. Its pages stopped my automated read at a human check, and I do not repeat a figure I have not seen myself. Our guide to hiring C# and .NET developers quotes an earlier ZipRecruiter figure and some Glassdoor senior numbers if you want a snapshot from April.
C# Developer Salary by Job Title
Talent.com publishes a page for each title, so I pulled ten of them for the table on the same day.
| Talent.com title page | Median | Low to high |
|---|---|---|
| Junior C# developer | $107,500 | $74,970 to $141,016 |
| C# developer | $113,563 | $91,773 to $148,748 |
| Senior C# developer | $118,600 | $95,557 to $167,250 |
| .NET developer, ASP.NET developer, WPF developer, .NET Core developer (four separate pages) | $120,233 on every one | $100,000 to $148,748 on three pages, $99,481 to $148,748 on .NET Core |
| C# software engineer | $124,250 | $97,250 to $171,020 |
| Unity developer | $127,500 | $101,781 to $150,023 |
| .NET architect | $143,375 | $121,853 to $215,665 |
Look at the fourth row. Four titles, four different daily jobs, one median to the dollar. Odd. The Unity pages disagree with each other, since Unity developer shows $127,500 and Unity game developer shows $120,233, a gap of $7,267 inside one specialty. The Java developer page shows $127,500 too, the same figure as the Unity page. Talent.com does not say how it matches titles to pages, and the repeats suggest some pages share data. I cannot confirm that.
Then the other end. The same site returns $56,212 for C# full stack developer and $76,515 for C# contractor, both far under the $91,773 floor on its plain C# developer page. Neither page carries a note. A page that contradicts its own parent is not a page to build a requisition from.
My habit is to pull the two or three title pages closest to the duties, set aside the one that looks wrong, and write down the spread. The spread is the honest answer. For the wider family of engineering titles, our software engineer salary guide does the same exercise.
C# Developer Salary by Years of Experience
Talent.com’s junior and senior C# pages sit $11,100 apart, $107,500 against $118,600, and the senior .NET developer page adds only $2,359 more at $120,959. That is a gentle slope for a career. Too gentle.
Payscale’s ladder is steeper and rests on fewer people. Under one year of experience, 16 salaries average $59,014 in total pay. At one to four years, 17 salaries average $74,285. Set an early-career developer on each site and the two land $33,215 apart ($107,500 against $74,285). The sites do not draw the ladder the same way.
Look at the top instead. The .NET architect page sits $24,775 above the senior C# page ($143,375 against $118,600), and its high of $215,665 is the biggest figure in any table here.
Years of C# tell you less in 2026 than they used to. Eight years can mean six on a .NET Framework 4.6 desktop application and two on cloud services. No salary page asks which. Ask anyway. Our questions for interviewing a C# developer include code to read aloud for exactly that.
C# Developer Salary by State and Metro
Here are three of Talent.com’s state lists, five places each.
| Place | C# developer | Senior C# developer | C# software engineer |
|---|---|---|---|
| First | California, $128,990 | California, $133,957 | California, $142,130 |
| Second | New York, $127,367 | Washington, $132,264 | Maryland, $136,677 |
| Third | Virginia, $126,730 | Virginia, $128,859 | Virginia, $134,492 |
| Fourth | New Jersey, $126,551 | Maryland, $128,716 | New Mexico, $126,303 |
| Fifth | Massachusetts, $124,742 | New York, $124,102 | New York, $126,270 |
Virginia holds third on all three lists, and Maryland appears on two. Both states sit in the Washington corridor, where our hiring guide says defense and government contractors built deep .NET benches. On the plain C# page the best state beats the fifth by only $4,248.
Does California carry a premium? Talent.com ranks it first on all three lists. ZipRecruiter ranks California 31st of 50 states on its C# .NET page and 19th on its .NET developer page. The two sites do not agree on whether the state pays more at all. For metros, ZipRecruiter puts Los Angeles at $120,423 on the .NET developer page, $8,662 or 7.75 percent above its $111,761 national average.
None of these pages crosses state with experience, so a Virginia figure of $126,730 blends the contractor with eight years behind them and the graduate in month two, and a metro average hides the same mix on a smaller map.
C# Developer Salary by Type of Work
Every public page above treats C# as one job. It is at least four. Our hiring guide, written by Mike Carter on our IT staffing team, sorts the market into four profiles and puts a base salary band on each.
| Profile | Typical stack | Mid-level base | Senior base |
|---|---|---|---|
| Modern .NET web API and microservices | ASP.NET Core, Minimal APIs, EF Core, Docker, gRPC | $118,000 to $145,000 | $155,000 to $200,000 |
| Legacy .NET Framework maintenance | .NET 4.x, WCF, WinForms, WebForms, SSRS | $105,000 to $130,000 | $140,000 to $175,000 |
| Azure-native .NET engineer | Functions, Service Bus, Cosmos DB, APIM, Bicep | $125,000 to $155,000 | $165,000 to $210,000 |
| Full-stack C# with Angular or React | ASP.NET Core back end, TypeScript front end | $120,000 to $148,000 | $158,000 to $198,000 |
Treat the table as our working ranges and not as a survey. It is the same table published in the hiring guide, and no aggregator in this guide can tell a legacy maintenance seat from an Azure platform seat. Compare the floors with ZipRecruiter’s 90th percentile of $137,500. Every senior floor clears it. Legacy clears it by $2,500, and Azure-native by $27,500. I cannot reconcile our bands with the public pages from the outside, since the aggregators do not publish their samples, and I would distrust anyone who says they can.
Two lanes are missing. Unity work shows $127,500 on the Talent.com Unity developer page, and our Unity developer hiring guide covers that market. Desktop and enterprise work sits on our .NET developer staffing page. The Azure-native row has its own salary guide, our Azure cloud engineer salary guide, where the public sources spread by tens of thousands of dollars on one platform.
The .NET Version on the Posting Changes the Search
Microsoft’s support policy page lists both .NET 8 and .NET 9 as out of support on November 10, 2026. .NET 10, the long-term support release that shipped on November 11, 2025, is supported through November 14, 2028. A posting that asks for .NET 8 experience asks for a runtime that no longer gets patches.
Version and pay. I went looking for a public source that prices runtime currency apart from plain C# experience, and found nothing. Not one of the salary pages above mentions a version. On our desk the question shows up as scope instead. A seat that owns the migration is a different job from a seat that writes new endpoints, and the first one needs somebody who has retargeted a codebase before. Our .NET 8 end-of-life planning guide covers what that retarget takes.
The pool is large. In the 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, 29.9 percent of professional developers reported using C#, just ahead of Java at 29.6 percent. At that size a vague posting draws plenty of resumes and very few that fit.
Contract Rates for the Same Levels
Our hiring guide pairs each level with a contract rate. Salary and rate come from the same guide, so they are comparable to each other, though not to the aggregator pages.
| Level | Experience | Base salary | Contract rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mid-level | 3 to 5 years | $115,000 to $145,000 | $70 to $95 an hour |
| Senior | 6 to 10 years | $150,000 to $200,000 | $100 to $140 an hour |
| Senior cloud-native or Azure | 7 or more years with cloud depth | $165,000 to $210,000 | $115 to $155 an hour |
| .NET architect | 10 or more years with design ownership | $185,000 to $230,000 | $140 to $185 an hour |
For scale, a $125,000 salary works out to about $60 an hour across 2,080 hours, and Talent.com’s $113,563 median converts to $57.47. Both sit under the $70 floor on the mid-level rate. A contractor carries their own benefits and time off, so the hourly number should never be compared with salary divided by 2,080. Whether the seat should be a direct hire or a contract engagement usually depends on how long the work runs, which has little to do with the pay band.
Pricing a Baton Rouge Seat Step by Step
I constructed this case for the arithmetic, so no client file stands behind it. A regional insurer in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, opens a senior C# developer seat on its claims platform. The HR director posts $113,563, the first figure on the first page that loaded. The platform runs on .NET 8, which left support on November 10, and the seat includes the move to .NET 10 with an Azure Service Bus queue in the middle. In the language of our hiring guide that is the modern .NET lane, where the senior band starts at $155,000.
| Check | Figure | Below the $155,000 senior floor |
|---|---|---|
| Posted figure, Talent.com C# developer page | $113,563 | $41,437 |
| Talent.com senior C# developer page | $118,600 | $36,400 |
| BLS median, software developers | $135,980 | $19,020 |
| ZipRecruiter 90th percentile, C# .NET developers | $137,500 | $17,500 |
Every public number sits under the band floor, and the posted figure sits furthest under it. Two honest ways out exist. Pay the band. Or rewrite the seat for a mid-level engineer, where the modern .NET range is $118,000 to $145,000. The original posting is still $4,437 short of that mid-level floor, so even the rewrite needs a small raise or a candidate closer to three years of experience. It also means someone senior has to review the retarget, because the mid-level engineer should not own it alone. Neither option is free.
The method is crude. My band comes from our own guide, and the public figures come from sources whose samples I cannot see, so the gap is a reason to ask questions and not proof about who is right. A crude method that exposes a $41,000 gap still beats a posting copied from one page.
What Candidates Say When the Number Goes Out
Does a C# developer earn more than a Java developer?
Not by any margin I can document. Talent.com’s Java developer page shows $127,500, which is $13,937 above its C# developer page, but the same figure sits on its Unity developer page, so I would not lean on it. Our hiring guide calls pay similar at equal seniority.
What does a junior C# developer actually earn?
$107,500 on the Talent.com junior page and $59,014 in total pay for under one year at Payscale, a gap of $48,486. Neither one shows a sample I would trust by itself, and Payscale’s figure rests on 16 people, so price a junior seat from the offers actually clearing in your own metro, then check the result against both pages.
Is a contract rate just salary divided by 2,080?
Salary divided by 2,080 only gets you partway. $125,000 comes to about $60 an hour, under the $70 floor on the mid-level contract rate in our hiring guide, and a contractor pays for their own benefits and time off out of the difference.
Should the job description still say .NET 8?
Name the runtime you are moving to. Microsoft ended support for .NET 8 and .NET 9 on November 10, 2026, and .NET 10 is supported through November 14, 2028. Ask for the retarget itself, such as a framework upgrade the candidate shipped to production.
Do Unity developers earn less than backend C# developers?
The reverse, on the pages I read. Talent.com shows $127,500 for Unity developer and $113,563 for C# developer, a gap of $13,937. Its Unity game developer page shows $120,233, so the pages disagree with each other by $7,267 before they disagree with anyone else.
How much does a .NET architect make?
$143,375 on Talent.com, with a range of $121,853 to $215,665. Our hiring guide lists $185,000 to $230,000 for architects with ten or more years and design ownership. The $41,625 gap between $143,375 and our $185,000 floor is the widest I found between a public page and our bands.
Name the Runtime Before You Name the Number
Write down the lane first. Which runtime the code runs on, whether Azure is in the job, and whether the seat writes new services or carries an old system through a migration. Then test the figure against three public pages and expect the three to disagree, because they do. Then write the spread down next to the band so the finance team sees the whole range and not one hopeful number.
If you want a second read, send the posting to our C# recruiting team and we will tell you which of the four lanes it most resembles. The salary benchmark assistant is free for a quick comparison across other roles, and our C# developer staffing page explains how we run these searches.
If you want reference points for any recruiter you talk to, ours are 17 days to a signed offer on the average IT search and 92 percent of placements still working for the client a year later.
