Internet Hourly Wage Rankings for Software Engineers in China
This article presents a data-driven ranking of hourly wages for Chinese internet companies across junior to expert-level software engineering positions, explaining the calculation method, highlighting top-paying firms, and noting limitations of the data source.
Today I share a useful reference for choosing a company: the "Internet hourly wage".
When selecting a company we often focus on total compensation (salary plus bonuses, stock, etc.), but total compensation does not reflect the hourly wage, which indicates how much you earn per unit of time.
Based on the "职级对标" (position level benchmarking) data, we compiled a ranking of hourly wages for engineering roles at major internet firms.
Note: The data below is for reference only; companies continuously improve their hourly wages. Data source: 职级对标, URL: https://duibiao.info/
Given the severe overtime in large tech firms, we created an hourly‑wage leaderboard to clarify which companies pay the most per hour. The statistics (China’s minimum hourly wage is about 22 CNY) are based on median salaries for junior, intermediate, senior, senior‑plus, and expert levels over the past year.
Calculation method: we took the median salary for each level, multiplied by the weekly working hours of large firms, and by 49 weeks (52 weeks minus 2 weeks of public holidays and 1 week of annual leave) to obtain annual work hours, then divided total compensation by annual work hours to get the hourly wage.
To ensure accuracy, positions with insufficient salary submissions were excluded from the ranking.
The data is refreshed weekly from the 职级对标 site.
Note: Lunch break is assumed to be two hours and is not counted as work time.
Junior Engineer Hourly Wage Ranking
Typically 0–2 years of experience.
Intermediate Engineer Hourly Wage Ranking
Typically 3–5 years of experience.
Senior Engineer Hourly Wage Ranking
Typically 5+ years of experience.
Senior‑Plus Engineer Hourly Wage Ranking
Typically 8+ years of experience.
Expert/Architect Hourly Wage Ranking
Typically 10+ years of experience.
Conclusion
From the statistics we can see:
Microsoft and Pinduoduo have strong hourly wages for junior, intermediate, and senior engineers.
Meituan, Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, and Baidu offer very competitive hourly wages for senior, senior‑plus, and expert engineers.
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