Base pay for IT workers rose just 0.8% in 2025, according to Motion Recruitment’s 2026 Tech Salary Guide. If you stopped reading there, you would assume the market went flat and stayed flat. It did not.
That single average hides one of the widest pay spreads the industry has seen in years. Where you land in it depends almost entirely on two things: the specialty you run in production, and the city you run it from.
For the people who keep Linux, containers, and cloud infrastructure alive, that spread is worth understanding in detail. Here is what the 2026 numbers look like for the roles most ComputingForGeeks readers hold, and what is quietly moving them up or down.
The 2026 Numbers for Infrastructure and DevOps Roles
Motion Recruitment’s 2026 guide breaks base compensation into mid-level (2 to 5 years) and senior-level (5+ years) tiers, drawn from thousands of real job orders validated against verified wage data. For the infrastructure and platform side of the house, the mid-level to senior ranges land roughly like this:
- Linux Administrator: $91,719 to $105,055 mid-level, rising to $112,800 to $135,400 senior
- Systems Engineer: $101,406 to $123,750 mid-level, $115,136 to $140,618 senior
- DevOps Engineer: $128,829 to $159,260 mid-level, $141,716 to $168,283 senior
- Site Reliability Engineer: $128,470 to $155,352 mid-level, $155,700 to $184,500 senior
- Cloud Engineer: $118,448 to $147,586 mid-level, $138,900 to $182,560 senior
- Cloud Architect: $151,304 to $174,130 (an architect role that starts at senior)
- DevSecOps Engineer: $149,736 to $182,894 mid-level, $160,900 to $198,700 senior
The pattern is hard to miss: the moment a role couples Linux fundamentals with automation, orchestration, or security, the numbers jump.
A plain systems administrator and a DevOps engineer might touch the same servers, but the second title carries a premium of roughly $40,000 at the mid-level, and the gap only widens with seniority.
Why the Average Raise Was Basically Zero, and Who Beat It
The 0.8% headline is an average of very different fortunes. On the way up, Motion’s data shows:
- Mid-level AI engineers up 9.2% year over year
- Senior data warehouse developers up 5.8%
- Detection engineers on the security side rising as much as 6%
On the way down, mid-level SQL developer pay fell more than 7%, and senior software developer base compensation dropped nearly 10%.
So the raise pool did not disappear. It concentrated. Employers are paying up for specialists who can build, secure, or scale the systems that matter, and paying less for generalized roles they can consolidate.
The practical move for anyone weighing their next step is to see which specializations are actually being funded right now, not last year. Salary guides describe the market in aggregate, but live postings show you the real thing: which skills are attached to which pay bands this quarter, and which titles are hiring at all.
It is worth browsing the latest tech jobs by discipline to see where the demand and the money are pooling before you commit to a certification path or a job switch.
Location Still Moves the Number More Than Your Title
Even with remote work now normal, geography remains the single biggest multiplier on a base salary. Motion’s guide applies city-specific variances to each discipline, and for infrastructure roles the spread is dramatic.
At the top, San Francisco pays roughly 1.11x the national baseline for infrastructure work, with Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, New York, and Seattle close behind. At the other end, Dallas comes in around 0.72x, Charlotte near 0.71x, and Atlanta around 0.80x.
Put concretely, a senior DevOps engineer near the top of the range can clear roughly $185,000 in San Francisco but land closer to $120,000 for the same work in a lower-cost metro, purely on location.
That gap is why “what does a DevOps engineer make” is an unanswerable question without a city attached. Remote roles muddy it further, since some companies anchor pay to your location and others to a national band.
Before accepting or countering an offer, check the multiplier for your actual market rather than trusting a nationwide average.
What Actually Moves Your Pay: Skills Over Titles
The clearest signal in the 2026 data is that employers increasingly hire by skill set, not job title. Motion’s guide makes the point directly, noting that many people doing identical work now carry different titles, and that job seekers do better identifying opportunities by skill than by role name.
The skills carrying premiums are the ones ComputingForGeeks covers every week. The Linux Foundation’s State of Tech Talent 2025 found organizations most understaffed in:
- AI and ML engineering (68% of organizations)
- Cybersecurity and compliance (65%)
- Cloud computing (59%)
- Platform engineering (56%)
The tooling data points the same way. Stack Overflow’s 2025 Developer Survey puts Docker in the hands of roughly 74% of professional developers, AWS around 46%, and Kubernetes at 30%, so container and cloud fluency is now baseline rather than a differentiator. Forrester adds that 75% of North American tech leaders plan to increase 2026 spending on cloud, data centers, and security.
Certifications still factor in, especially where they map to a clear discipline. A networking cert can move an engineer’s pay in a measurable way, which ComputingForGeeks has broken down in its own analysis of whether the CCNA is worth it in 2026.
The broader lesson holds across the stack. CompTIA projects tech occupation employment to grow at roughly twice the rate of the overall U.S. workforce over the next decade, and that growth is landing squarely on the data, cloud, security, and infrastructure skills most of this site’s readers already practice.
Deepen those, keep an eye on what the market is actually paying for, and the flat 0.8% average stops being your ceiling.
