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Tools

  • Salary BenchmarkPrice your budget against the market

What does your budget buy?

Enter your salary, cash bonus, and equity offer to see how competitive you are in your target market.

Market
Role
Company stage
Suggested packageA competitive offer here — edit any figure to use your own

$0 a year of equity at today's valuation

What the bands above cost

Cash against equity

Method and sources

Sources

  • SF Bay AreaBLS OEWS, SOC 15-1252, San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward + San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara metros, employment-weighted (2023-05)
  • New YorkBLS OEWS, SOC 15-1252, New York-Newark-Jersey City metro (2023-05)
  • SeattleBLS OEWS, SOC 15-1252, Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue metro (2023-05)
  • CanadaESDC Job Bank / Statistics Canada Labour Force Survey, NOC 21231 Software engineers and designers, national (2024)
  • ItalyCommercial compensation surveys for Italy (consensus of several estimates); no official occupation-level percentile series exists (2025)— indicative only

Valuations

The suggested package prices equity as a percentage of a company. Default valuations are US median post-money figures (Carta, 2025) — pre-seed ~$10M, seed $24M, Series A $78.7M, Series B ~$140M, Series C ~$400M, Series D+ $2B+ — scaled per market and per stage.

Rounds outside the Bay Area price lower, and the gap is widest at the earliest stages: European Series A pre-money runs near $28M against roughly $48M in the US, European seed pre-money at about a €5.6M median, and European rounds generally 30–50% below US pricing for comparable companies. Late-stage rounds are priced far more globally, so the discount narrows. The scaling below is applied to the US medians and interpolated across the stages between:

  • SF Bay Area100% at pre-seed → 100% at Series D+
  • New York82% at pre-seed → 92% at Series D+
  • Seattle72% at pre-seed → 85% at Series D+
  • Canada45% at pre-seed → 60% at Series D+
  • Italy26% at pre-seed → 42% at Series D+

The two US figures are the softest numbers on this page. They reflect the Bay Area's premium in round size rather than a separately published series.

The suggested package

The opening figures are a suggestion for a company that wants to compete for strong engineers, not an average of what companies at that stage pay. Base salary is set per market and stage; the percentile it reaches is an output.

The same offer sits at a different height in different markets, because the competition differs. In the Bay Area the band above the median is packed with employers a startup cannot outbid on cash, and moving from the median to the top 10% costs about $143,000 — so a strong Series A offer there is upper-middle. In Italy the same climb costs about €30,000 and the band above the median is thin and largely made up of people employed remotely from abroad, so a funded startup is among the best-paying employers in the country. Canada sits between the two.

Definitions

  • Figures are annual total compensation: base salary, bonus and equity combined.
  • Percentiles are measured against all engineers in the selected market and role category, at every level of seniority.
  • Published wage statistics cover cash only, so the model is fitted against its own cash figures. Equity is added on top of that.
  • A target bonus is counted at 80% of face value, since it is contingent and the wage statistics record bonuses at the amount actually paid.
  • Private equity is counted at its expected value, not its paper value. The assumptions behind that calculation are listed under “Cash against equity” above and can be changed.
  • A grant percentage is entered over a four-year vest; annual paper value is that percentage of the valuation, divided by four.

Limitations

  • US wage statistics do not record annual figures above about $239,000. Above the 90th percentile the model is extrapolating and results are marked as estimates.
  • Precision is lower at the top. The threshold curve is steep there, so a small change in percentile is a large change in money.
  • Italy has no official occupation-level wage series. The figure used is a consensus of commercial survey estimates that differ by roughly 15%.
  • Above roughly the 95th percentile, Italian and Canadian pay is driven largely by employers based abroad. The model accounts for this explicitly.

Model version salary-mixture-2026.09-v1.

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