Tech Salary vs Non-Tech at Same Level: Gap Data

At the manager level, a tech executive earns a median base salary of $171,200. A financial manager earns $161,700. That $9,500 gap — roughly 6% — is not the story. The story is what happens when you add equity grants, and why comparing base salaries across the tech and non-tech divide produces a systematically misleading picture of who is actually compensated more.

Key Numbers at a Glance

Source: BLS OEWS May 2024. Note: BLS suppresses the 90th percentile annual wage when it exceeds $239,200, reporting only that it is above this threshold. Figures cover U.S. wage and salary workers across all employers, not exclusively large tech firms.

What the Base Salary Gap Actually Is

The headline-level comparison is closer than a decade of “tech pays more” coverage suggests. Salary benchmarking for $150k+ earners almost always starts with base salary — which is precisely where the tech premium is weakest at the manager level. According to BLS OEWS May 2024, computer and information systems managers earn a median of $171,200, versus $161,700 for financial managers and $161,030 for marketing managers. That is a gap of roughly 6% to 6.5% at the median — statistically meaningful, but not the order-of-magnitude difference popular narratives imply.

The gap widens at the individual contributor level. Software developers report a median of $133,080 (BLS OEWS May 2024, SOC 15-1252), and their 75th percentile sits at $169,000. Equivalent non-tech individual contributors — financial analysts, for instance — report a median of roughly $99,000 at the national level, a $34,000 base salary gap. So the comparison is not symmetric: it depends heavily on which level and which comparison occupations you select.

The BLS 90th percentile figure is suppressed for both tech and non-tech managers — reported only as exceeding $239,200 — which means the raw data cannot tell you how far above that floor either group actually reaches. That’s where the data gets genuinely interesting, and where you have to leave the OEWS tables behind.

Source: BLS OEWS May 2024 (median and 10th/90th pct for managers); BLS OEWS May 2024 (software developers — median, 75th, 90th percentile confirmed). 75th percentile figures for managers marked “~” are drawn from BLS OEWS May 2023 data, the most recent year with occupation-level detail available at time of publication — growth since then has been modest and these figures are directionally accurate. Marketing manager 75th percentile not published as a separate line item in accessible BLS tables.

Where the Real Gap Lives: Total Compensation

Base salary tells you what someone earns for showing up. Total compensation versus base salary is a fundamentally different question, and it is where tech creates separation that no amount of base-salary comparison can capture.

For a senior software engineer at a large tech company, the Levels.fyi 2024 End of Year Pay Report — self-reported, skewed toward FAANG and well-funded companies, and therefore representing the upper market rather than the median — shows total compensation routinely running 50% to 100% above base salary once equity grants and target bonuses are included. A senior engineer at a top-tier firm with a $180,000 base salary might carry an additional $80,000 to $150,000 in annualized equity grant value and a 15% to 20% target bonus. Total compensation in that scenario runs $290,000 to $390,000.

Non-tech managers at equivalent seniority rarely see equity structured that way. How equity grants factor into compensation differs structurally between industries: a financial manager at a regional bank or insurance firm may receive a modest annual bonus — BLS National Compensation Survey data shows the average private-sector management bonus runs approximately 12% of salary — but rarely an RSU grant with the vesting schedule and share-price upside common in publicly traded tech companies. A $161,700 base with a 12% target bonus puts total cash compensation around $181,000. No equity. That’s a very different package than a tech manager at $171,200 base with a 20% bonus and $100,000 annualized in RSUs: total compensation approaching $305,000.

The math matters for $150k+ households deciding between a non-tech senior management track and a lateral move into tech. A $10,000 base salary difference understates a potential $100,000-plus total compensation gap in annual terms, and the equity upside is not captured in any base comparison at all.

The Role of Employer Type: Where You Work Matters More Than the Title

Within tech, the variation is massive. The Dice 2024 Tech Salary Report found an average tech worker salary of $112,500 in 2024 — far below FAANG medians and consistent with BLS data showing a median of $105,990 for all computer and IT occupations, not just elite employers. Aerospace and defense led industry-level average salaries for tech workers at $130,574; software industry roles averaged $130,559. Banking and finance tech roles averaged $126,226. The gap between working as a software engineer at a large fintech versus a small logistics company is often larger than the gap between tech and non-tech at equivalent employer tiers.

The same is true in reverse. Finance salary benchmarks in the $150k to $500k range cover a wide band — a financial manager at a securities firm in the securities, commodity contracts, and financial investments sector earned an annual mean of $243,990 according to BLS OEWS May 2024 industry-specific data, which places that subgroup above many tech managers at non-elite employers. Framing the comparison as “tech vs. non-tech” collapses variation that is actually larger within each sector than across them.

The Finluxy Compensation Percentile: Where Do These Roles Actually Sit?

The Finluxy Compensation Percentile locates a stated total compensation package within the BLS wage distribution for the same occupation and metropolitan statistical area (MSA). The table below calculates base salary positioning for illustrative compensation figures across both sectors. Total compensation positioning is estimated using BLS base percentiles as the foundation and adjusting for typical equity and bonus structures documented in the sources cited.

Sources: BLS OEWS May 2024 (base salary percentiles); Levels.fyi 2024 End of Year Pay Report (tech total compensation, self-reported, skewed toward large employers); Dice 2024 Tech Salary Report; BLS National Compensation Survey (bonus percentages). Total compensation percentile estimates are approximations — BLS does not publish a total compensation percentile distribution that incorporates equity.

Metro Area: The Multiplier That Changes the Percentile

National BLS OEWS data treats all employers as a single distribution. Within MSA data, the picture shifts substantially. Software engineer salary by city and geographic pay differences for remote workers both document how much the metro area moves the Finluxy Compensation Percentile. A software developer earning $145,000 base in Dallas occupies a different percentile within the Dallas–Fort Worth MSA than the same salary does in the San Francisco MSA, where BLS OEWS data consistently shows the 75th percentile for computer occupations running materially above the national figures.

Non-tech managers face the same dynamic, but the premium attached to specific cities is different by role. VP and director salary benchmarks by industry show that finance concentrates high-paying roles in New York City, Boston, and Chicago; marketing in New York and Los Angeles; tech management in San Francisco, Seattle, and Austin. A financial manager with a $161,700 base earns above the national median, but may be below the 50th percentile within the New York City MSA, where the securities-industry concentration pushes local benchmarks well above national figures.

The Overlooked Insight: Non-Tech Can Out-Earn Tech at Senior Levels in Specific Sectors

Most coverage of the tech-vs-non-tech salary gap assumes tech wins at every level and in every comparison. The BLS OEWS data does not support that framing at senior management levels. Financial managers in the securities and investments sector reported an annual mean wage of $243,990 in May 2024 — above the mean wage for computer and information systems managers across all industries ($187,990). Architectural and engineering managers reported a mean of $175,710. Natural sciences managers reported $173,500.

The sector and employer tier determine compensation outcomes more reliably than the tech-vs-non-tech binary. A senior finance manager at Goldman Sachs or a top hedge fund with cash bonus compensation well above 50% of base will out-earn a software manager at a mid-market tech company by a wide margin in total compensation — often by $200,000 or more in a good year. That story is absent from most salary comparison analyses because it disrupts the clean narrative, and because hedge fund and investment bank bonus data is not systematically captured in any public OEWS dataset.

Reading BLS salary data correctly means understanding where the data caps out — BLS cannot tell you what a managing director at a top investment bank earns, because the 90th percentile is suppressed at $239,200. Above that threshold, you are working with industry survey data, disclosed proxy filings, and Radford / Aon survey products that are not publicly available at the individual level.

What the Numbers Mean for a $150k+ Household

For a household already earning $150k+, the tech-vs-non-tech salary gap analysis is really a question about which path leads to higher total compensation over a 5- to 10-year horizon, not which role has a higher base salary today. Income growth rates by profession over the past decade show that software developers have seen strong median wage growth, but that growth is compressing as the market normalizes post-pandemic tech-hiring surge: Dice data showed salary growth of just 1.2% for IT workers in 2024.

Three practical thresholds matter for this decision. First, if equity is the primary driver of a total compensation premium, the relevant question is how liquid that equity is — RSUs at a public company are cash-equivalent on a vesting schedule; equity at a pre-IPO startup carries substantial dilution and exit risk. Valuing RSU grants properly is a separate calculation from reading base salary data. Second, at the $150k base salary level, the marginal tax structure means a dollar of equity income is not worth a dollar of salary — timing, vesting, and AMT exposure all affect the net value. Third, the highest-paying non-tech tracks — senior finance, investment management, certain consulting firm tiers — compress the total compensation gap significantly at VP and director levels, particularly through cash bonus structures that are liquid in the year earned.

Consulting salary by firm tier and product manager salary by percentile and experience round out the comparison for households weighing a lateral move. A director-level product manager at a large tech company occupies a different total compensation tier than a strategy director at a consulting firm, but the gap at the $150k base level is small enough that non-salary factors — equity liquidity, role stability, and hours expectations — often determine which path actually produces more net wealth in a five-year window. The BLS data sets the baseline. Everything above the 90th percentile requires a more granular source.

Finally, households comparing offers should recognize where BLS salary data is silent: it does not capture sign-on bonuses, profit-sharing distributions, deferred compensation, or the full value of benefits packages — all of which can vary substantially between tech and non-tech employers at senior levels. The gap from $100k to $150k is largely a base salary story; the gap above $150k is increasingly a total compensation story that requires employer- and sector-specific data to resolve accurately.