What Is a Good Salary for Your Role and Location?

"Good salary" is one of the most searched and least useful phrases in career discussions. $80,000 is life-changing in rural Ohio and barely sufficient in San Francisco. Whether a salary is good depends on your role, your experience, your location, and — critically — what you actually do with your time. Here's how to figure out where you stand.

How to benchmark your salary

Start with external data sources that reflect current market rates for your specific role and location. Don't use national averages — they're nearly meaningless for individual decisions.

• Levels.fyi

  Best for tech roles. Shows base, bonus, and equity by company, level, and location. Highly granular — useful for software engineers, product managers, and data roles.

• Glassdoor & LinkedIn Salary

  Broader coverage across industries. Filter by job title, city, years of experience, and company size. Use both and average the results.

• Industry-specific surveys

  Many professional associations publish annual compensation surveys — Robert Half for finance/accounting, SHRM for HR, the Stack Overflow survey for developers. These often have better data than general platforms.

What percentile should you aim for?

The 50th percentile (median) is the market rate — average pay for average performance. The 75th percentile reflects strong market positioning, appropriate for candidates with specific skills, strong track records, or leverage. The 25th percentile is a warning sign: it typically means you're underpaid relative to market, and it's worth finding out why.

Most people making a lateral move should target the 50th percentile at minimum. If you're bringing specific expertise or switching from a less competitive market, the 65th–75th is a reasonable target.

The number that actually matters

Gross salary tells you less than you think. What you should really care about is your real hourly rate — what you actually earn per hour of life spent working. Two jobs paying the same gross salary can differ by 30–40% in real value once you account for hours, commute, and benefits.

Calculate it this way: take your net annual income (after tax), divide by total hours worked per year including commute time. That's your real rate. Use it to compare offers, benchmark against the market, and decide whether a raise is actually a raise.

Red flags that suggest you're underpaid

• Your salary hasn't increased by at least the rate of inflation in the past two years
• New hires in similar roles are being offered significantly more than you earn
• You've taken on substantially more responsibility without a corresponding raise
• Your market benchmarks put you below the 40th percentile for your role
• Colleagues who left for competitors came back earning 20%+ more

Location adjusts everything

A $95,000 salary in Austin, TX has significantly more purchasing power than the same number in New York or San Francisco. Before deciding whether a salary is good, factor in the cost of living index for your city. MIT's Living Wage Calculator and NerdWallet's cost-of-living tool can help you normalize across locations.

If you're evaluating an offer in a new city, always run the cost-of-living adjustment before accepting. A $30,000 raise that moves you to a 40% more expensive city is often a net loss in real purchasing power.