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South African tech salaries — what we can and can't say

An honest look at the data we have, the data we don't, and where to find real numbers.

Most South African tech salary "data" you'll find online is either marketing fluff from recruitment agencies or self-reported aggregates with massive sampling bias. We could publish a confident-sounding salary table built from job listings, but we'd be lying — fewer than 5% of SA tech listings publish a salary range.

What the listings actually contain

The vast majority of SA tech job postings deliberately omit salary. Recruiters do this because:

  • It maximises their negotiation leverage at offer stage.
  • SA labour law doesn't require salary disclosure on listings.
  • Many "market-related" salaries are actually below market — quiet is safer.

When we do see salary in a listing, it's usually a wide band designed to be aspirational ("R600k–R1.2m") rather than informative.

The sources that actually have data

For real SA tech salary numbers, we point people at:

  • OfferZen's State of Software Developer Nation — annual survey, free, the cleanest dataset for SA software roles specifically.
  • Levels.fyi — global, but increasingly has SA data for the big employers (Amazon CT, Google CT, Stripe).
  • Glassdoor / PayScale — self-reported, treat directional, never individual.

Rough mental model (use sparingly)

For software roles in the major metros, very rough current bands:

  • Junior (0-2 yrs): R20k–R45k/month
  • Mid (2-5 yrs): R45k–R80k/month
  • Senior (5+ yrs): R80k–R150k/month
  • Staff / Lead / Principal: R150k+/month — very wide variance

Add 30-50% if the company pays in USD/EUR/GBP. Subtract if you're outside major metros, in non-software roles (QA, design, data analysis often pay less than dev), or in deeply enterprise environments paying slow.

How to negotiate when listings don't show salary

  • Ask the recruiter for the band on the first call — most will tell you.
  • Don't share your current salary until you've heard their range.
  • Have a number in mind before the conversation. "Market" is not a number.

Will this guide ever have hard numbers?

We're scraping a sample of listings that do publish salaries. When we have enough to be meaningful (probably mid-2026), we'll add a live salary section here that shows median/p25/p75 by role and city. Until then, we'd rather be honest than precisely wrong.