According to the latest data from Bankrate, two-thirds of Americans got paid more in the 12 months from October 2023.
It found that 61 percent of workers got a salary increase from earning a pay raise at their current job or finding a new, better-paying position––or both.
That is slightly below the previous year’s figure of 64 percent, and thanks to a sluggish labor market, workers were more likely to have gotten an increase thanks to a raise at their current job (49 percent).
Accepted wisdom tells us that changing jobs delivers the biggest dividend. Last year, career planning site Zippa found that the average salary increase when changing jobs is 14.8 percent, and a recent workforce report found that the median pay boost for job remainers was considerably lower at 4.8 percent.
Five jobs to apply for
- Software Engineer III, Forward Slope Inc., San Diego, ($120,000 – $155,000)
- Software Engineer II (AWS, Python), The Travelers Companies, Inc., Hartford ($117,200 – $193,400)
- Network Engineer, Michigan Schools and Government Credit Union, Clinton Township
- DevOps Engineer, CareCentrix, Remote ($120,000 – $130,000)
- Data Architect (Remote), ICF, Reston ($84,533 – $143,706)
But while inflation is slowing, workers still feel worse off, with 59 percent of employed Americans saying their income has not kept pace with increases in their household expenses over the past 12 months.
The consumer price index (CPI) climbed to 2.7 percent in the last year, rising by 0.3 percent last month alone. Grocery store items have risen half a percent, with the cost of eggs soaring further thanks to an avian flu outbreak.
Beef also costs more, as do nonalcoholic beverages. Rent is rising, albeit more slowly; motor vehicle insurance increased by 0.1 percent, airline fares rose another 0.4 percent after a large 3.2 percent increase in October, and healthcare services are more expensive also.
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Given the context, it’s unsurprising that another new report by Bankrate found that most Americans would struggle to live comfortably off $100,000 a year.
The study found that $186,000 annually is now the magic number US workers say is needed to live comfortably. That’s despite the average full-time worker earning half that at $79,000 annually.
Bankrate also found that the biggest pay bumps over the past year have gone to younger workers. It points out that they are “Early in their careers and having not yet hit their peak earnings”.
Even so, 53 percent of all workers say they are confident they will receive a pay increase in the next 12 months, either by finding a new, better-paying job or getting a raise at their current job.
Five more jobs to discover
- Sr AI Engineer, Vorto Operations LLC, Denver ($120,000 – $180,000)
- Lead AI Engineer, i4DM, Remote
- Software Developer – Java, Uline, Pleasant Prairie
- Software Developer, Paycom Payroll Llc, Oklahoma City
- Principal Data Engineer – Remote US, Seamless.AI, Remote
What you do for work greatly impacts what you can expect to earn, too. New data from BairesDev shows that core tech skills are (perhaps unsurprisingly) increasingly sought after. Machine learning has seen a 383 percent growth rate, followed by Angular, Flutter, Kotlin, and Terraform.
The study also found a 77 percent rise in demand for data infrastructure skills.
Regarding AI, skills essential for building AI platforms and applications include React, .NET, Python, Node, and Java.
“Over the past five years, we’ve seen a steady and sometimes steep increase in demand for developers who specialise in tools like Snowflake, MongoDB, and Databricks, amongst others,” says BairesDev’s CTO, Justice Erolin.
“If AI is a gold rush and you’re a developer, you might want to be selling the pickaxes. In this case, the pickaxes are skills related to data because a well-maintained data infrastructure is the engine that drives a successful AI product.”
