Pay rates can vary widely across different salary calculators, and those calculators let you conduct searches that range from the broad to the microscopically specific. Some may let you search based on city, others on degrees received, and still others on past work history. Others are less generous in their offerings, only letting you look at job titles and little more.
We pulled the results from six different jobs and salary sites to get an aggregate idea of what Node.js developers are making in 2020. For devs and hiring managers alike, here's what you can expect.
Stack Overflow
Stack Overflow, the go-to resource for developers, offers a useful tool for salary estimates based on data from its yearly global survey of programmers. It allows for searches based on technologies used, years of experience, and location. The tool shows the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles of salaries for developers with the chosen parameters. We looked for programmers in the United States who use Node.js and have bachelor's degrees, and we zeroed in on the 50th percentile.
According to Stack Overflow, Node.js developers earn between $83,000 for those starting out to $115,000 for those with 15 years of experience.
ZipRecruiter
ZipRecruiter only lets you search for different job titles, excluding most of the tools used to show gradations in pay over the course of a developer's career. We looked at the average pay rate for both Node.js developers ($103,677) and Senior Node.js developers ($108,878).
Glassdoor
Glassdoor doesn't let you search by specific numbers of years of experience, but it allows you to search by spans of time, such as 4-6 years, 7-9 years, and so on. Each salary search on Glassdoor yields a distribution of salaries with an average, which we used for our measurements.
Entry-level Node.js programmers can expect $81,618 (the lowest estimate of all the sites we surveyed), while experienced devs with 15 years under their belts earn an average of $106,381.
PayScale
PayScales extensive search parameters include not only job title, location and years of experience, but criteria like what product the company sells and an employee's previous military experience. We looked at Node.js developers in Austin, Texas with a Bachelor's Degree in the market for a "Back End Developer / Engineer" job and Node.js as a required skill.
We averaged the high and low estimates PayScale provided for each year of experience. Inexperienced developers start at $80,500, and those with upper level seniority can expect $132,500—by far the highest estimate of any site.
Indeed
Indeed doesn't have specific data for years of experience or location, and it contains no data on the salaries of Node.js programmers, only broader categories. We searched "Backend developer", which the site claims earn an average of $127,202, which strikes us as about what someone with 7-9 years of experience could expect.
Final results
Aggregated together, this is what a Node.js developer can expect to earn in the United States.
Node.js Developer Salaries, August 2020
We combined years of experience and averaged them out to get a figure for each year range (for example, the salary of a Node.js developer on Stack Overflow at 4 years, 5 years, and 6 years were averaged to get the figure for those with 4-6 years of experience).
Overall, Junior Node.js developers earn about $85,78 and Senior Node.js developers earn about $116,690.
Your mileage can obviously vary, and none of these factors in the specifics of the hiring company or the exigency with which they're trying to fill a role. Since these are ultimately average values, roughly 50% of developers will earn more than the average, and 50% will earn less.
But if you're an HR director just getting your bearings or a developer wondering what you’re worth salary-wise, this information above is a good place to start.