Salaries for Remote Work Are Going Up — For Now

New PayScale data shows how the pandemic is impacting tech worker salaries

Sudarshan Sampath
Marker

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A photo of a woman in a video meeting for work.
Photo: ake1150sb/Getty Images

As stay-at-home orders across the country begin to loosen, many tech companies are choosing to keep their offices closed. As these employees continue to work from home, how will this affect their salaries?

Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, we analyzed over 1 million salaries to understand if there was a pay benefit for telecommuters, or workers who primarily worked from home. We found that 54% of telecommuters earned more than those who worked in the office, contrary to popular belief that remote workers are paid less than their in-person counterparts.

Since the pandemic hit, we’ve continued to see higher pay for remote workers in the tech industry. By isolating 89,919 survey respondents nationally and 14,161 Bay Area respondents within the technology industry, we were able to measure how salaries have changed for telecommuters in the tech industry since Covid-19. To fully understand the differences in pay across remote workers and overall workers, we look at two different measures: the uncontrolled pay difference and the controlled pay difference.

The uncontrolled pay difference does not account for employment characteristics, such as job title or years of…

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Sudarshan Sampath
Marker
Writer for

I am the Director of Research at PayScale, Inc., the world’s leading compensation analytics platform. I study trends in labor markets and develop data products.