Increases in Pay:
High for Accountants, Low for Software Developers
May 2005

Budgeted base salary increases for U.S. employees in the tech industry averaged 3.2 percent over the past year. However, changes in pay rates varied widely by position.

Table 1 presents recent changes in pay for four senior-level professional positions in U.S. technology companies. Over the past year, compensation for Senior Staff Accountants increased an average of 6.1 percent, whereas Senior Software Developers increased by only 1.3 percent.

These changes continue a three-year trend in above average increases for senior accountants and below average increases for senior software developers. The pay changes for accountants is likely driven by the additional responsibilities assigned to them under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002.
 

Companies do not apply increase budgets evenly across all jobs, evident by the changes reported above. Corporate objectives, job candidate availability, and geography all impact pay levels. As always, reliable survey-based job-specific data is a necessity for setting appropriate compensation levels.

- Will Parsons

Data Source: The Culpepper Compensation Surveys U.S. database as of May 1, 2005.

Data based upon non-weighted job averages. The dataset contains pay data limited to companies that provided incumbent data for the position across two consecutive years. All employees in senior-level positions typically have six or more years of experience and operate under minimal supervision.