| Seniority | Work mode | Postings | Median floor | Median ceiling |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Senior | Office | 46 | $196k | $240k |
| Senior | Hybrid | 41 | $192k | $240k |
| Senior | Remote | 31 | $163k | $240k |
| Staff | Office | 29 | $211.4k | $278k |
| Staff | Hybrid | 15 | $205k | $247k |
| Staff | Remote | 29 | $182.6k | $279k |
| Mid (no marker) | Office | 82 | $168k | $272.5k |
| Mid (no marker) | Hybrid | 37 | $174.6k | $240k |
| Mid (no marker) | Remote | 45 | $146k | $225k |
Read on 1 September 2026 from the public job boards of 34 technology companies. Every row, the selection rules and the classifier are published in the full dataset.
Ask whether remote engineers earn less and you get a shouting match. One side has a story about a pay cut, the other has a story about a San Francisco salary collected from a beach. Almost nobody has numbers, because the honest comparison needs published pay, and until recently pay was not published.
It is now. US transparency laws mean most tech postings carry a salary band, and a band is a fact you can count. So we read the public job boards of roughly 120 technology companies and kept every engineering posting with a published US band: 361 postings from 34 companies, each classified as office, hybrid or remote from the posting’s own text. Every row is published, with the rules, so the numbers below can be argued with.
They surprised us. The argument everyone is having is about the wrong end of the range.
For senior engineers, the median ceiling of a remote band is $240,000. The median ceiling of an office band is $240,000. Not close. Identical.
The floors are not. The median office floor is $196,000; the median remote floor is $163,000, 17 percent lower. Staff level tells the same story: ceilings within half a percent of each other, floors 14 percent apart.
So the phrase “remote pays less” is true only in the way an average is true. The maximum a company will put in writing for a senior engineer does not move when the role goes remote. What moves is the minimum it reserves the right to offer.
An office posting prices one city. A remote posting is several offers wearing one band: the company’s highest-cost tier at the top and its lowest at the bottom, folded into a single range because the posting has to be legal everywhere it might hire.
The width data says exactly that. Remote bands are the widest of the three modes, a median of $76,250 from floor to ceiling against $70,000 for office and $60,000 for hybrid.
There is a second, quieter finding. In 361 postings, not one company published the same title in two work modes at once. The mode is decided per role before the posting goes up. The clean experiment, the same job priced both ways by the same employer, does not exist in public, and the companies are the ones declining to run it.
The floor of a remote band is not your offer. It is the widest net the company can legally cast. Where you land inside it is set by the same things as ever, seniority and scarcity and negotiation, plus one new thing: which location tier they file you under.
Which means the practical question to ask a recruiter is not “what is the range”, which you already read, but “what is the range for my location tier”. That single question collapses a $76k band to the $20k or so that actually applies to you, and it tells you whether the posting’s ceiling was ever reachable from where you sit.
Flip the same numbers around and they say something startups mostly have not noticed: hiring remote does not save you money at the top of the market. If you want the senior engineer every other company wants, the data says you will publish the same $240k ceiling whether or not you have an office. The people are priced nationally now.
What remote buys you is not a discount on the best person. It is access to floors an office posting cannot reach, because the band is allowed to include places where $170k is a spectacular offer rather than a mediocre one.
And that curve does not stop at the border, though the postings do. Every band in this dataset is US-listed; the same seniority on a remote contract from Latin America or Eastern Europe bills in the $50 to $80 an hour range, roughly $100k to $160k a year at full time, off the bottom of every chart above. The US market already repriced remote work at the floor. It has simply not finished extending the axis.
It is postings, not paychecks: bands say what companies commit to in writing, not what anyone signed for. It is 34 technology companies that publish pay, swept on one day, so it inherits every bias of transparency laws and of tech. The mid bucket is the noisiest, because a title with no seniority marker lands there whatever the job really is. And where a posting listed several location tiers, we kept the lowest floor and the highest ceiling, which is exactly the stretching this article describes.
All of it, every posting with its link and the classifier that sorted it, is in the open dataset. If the numbers move when someone cuts them differently, that is the conversation working.
If what you took from the chart is that the interesting engineers are now below every published floor, that is the part we do daily. Tell us what you are building and you will meet senior remote engineers at $50 to $80 an hour, each vetted on a paid trial before you ever see a profile.
Privacy is important to us, so you have the option of disabling certain types of storage that may not be necessary for the basic functioning of the website. Blocking categories may impact your experience on the website. More information
