Google Pays the Most

Google software engineers reported the highest base salary this year, $128,336, up nearly 12 percent from $114,596 in 2011.

Though still behind Google in software engineers’ salaries by about 3.8 percent, Facebook is closing the gap. This year Facebook is paying its software engineers $123,626 on average, up 14.7 percent from $107,744 in 2011.

Other top 5 companies in terms of software engineers’ average base pay were Apple: $114,413, eBay: $108,809 and Zynga: $105,568.

Although Microsoft didn’t make the top five, the tech giant saw a nearly 9 percent jump this year in average base pay for software engineers—to $104,362 from $95,932 in 2011.

The Glassdoor study shows that software engineers’ pay also increased this year at Amazon with an average base salary of $103,070, up from $101,129 in 2011, Hewlett-Packard: $95,567, up from $91,698; Oracle: $102,204, up from $100,723; Qualcomm: $98,964, up from $97,418; and Yahoo: $100,122, up from $97,271.

The Glassdoor data show some modest declines in software engineers’ average base pay this year. No. 3 on the top salaries list this year, Apple actually experienced a drop in salaries to $114,413 from $119,266 in 2011. Pay at eBay fell to $108,809 from $112,992. Also seeing declines were Cisco: to $101,909 from $104,819; IBM: to $89,390 from $91,231; Intel: to $92,194 from $94,347; and Intuit: to $103,284 from $105,553.

Software engineer interns at Google received average monthly pay of $6,566, compared with those at Facebook, who received $6,224 a month. Glassdoor said this report did not provide enough data to compare year-over-year figures or to look at other companies.

Software engineers in the San Francisco Bay Area have average base salaries of $107,798 in 2012, up from $105,120 from last year. That’s a 2.5 percent increase, on par with the national average.

Seattle follows behind San Francisco with average base salary for software engineers at $102,006 this year, compared with $96,149 in 2011.

Other regions in the top five salary-wise for software engineers were San Diego: $93,529, Boston: $93,403 and New York: $92,701. In fact, salaries rose in all of the top five regions.