AI Salary Trends

How AI pay has moved month over month, computed from disclosed salaries on company career pages. Each month's figures are the salaries of roles first observed by Joblaze that month — no surveys, no recruiter estimates.

$152.5k latest median (Sep 2026) 1011 disclosed salaries 5 months of data

AI salary by month

Percentile bands over the lower bound of each disclosed range. Only complete months are shown; months with fewer than 25 disclosed salaries are omitted, and the sample size behind each month is shown so you can weigh thinner months yourself.

Month 25th pct Median 75th pct Salaries
Sep 2026 $109k $152.5k $189.7k 556
Aug 2026 $112.9k $157.0k $192.1k 132
Jul 2026 $112k $154.6k $192.0k 136
Jun 2026 $121.9k $151.5k $188.4k 86
May 2026 $116k $150k $196k 101

From May 2026 to Sep 2026, the median for AI moved from $150k (101 salaries) to $152.5k (556 salaries).

Hiring demand

AI's share of tagged postings moved from 6.4% to 10.58% from May 2026 to Sep 2026, over 1175 postings — within the companies Joblaze scans. The salary table above covers only the months with enough disclosed salaries to report, so the two tables need not span the same months.

Month Share of postings Postings
Sep 2026 10.58% 319
Aug 2026 8.08% 223
Jul 2026 8.48% 256
Jun 2026 7.56% 201
May 2026 6.4% 176

See which skills are gaining and losing the most →

Browse AI jobs All salary data

Methodology

Each month groups AI roles by the month they were first seen on a company career page. Only roles with a disclosed annual salary are included; non-USD salaries are converted to USD at current rates and hourly rates are excluded, to keep medians comparable. Percentiles are calculated over the lower bound of each disclosed range, which makes the medians conservative.

Holding the skill fixed removes skill-mix bias — but not the other kinds. The series still moves with which employers, locations and seniority levels happen to post AI roles in a given month, and with exchange rates for non-USD salaries. It describes postings Joblaze observed, not the whole market. The first month of coverage (when our backlog was first scanned) and the current in-progress month are excluded, and months with too few disclosed salaries are dropped rather than shown as unreliable points.

Citing this trend? Link to this page — the series extends as new jobs are scanned.

Download the aggregate data (CSV)

Reproducible: percentiles are PostgreSQL percentile_cont over advertised annual minimums converted to USD; see Methodology.