Salary Survey Extra is a series of periodic dispatches that give added insight into the findings of our most recent Salary Survey. These posts contain previously unpublished Salary Survey data.

There are IT jobs in every U.S. state. If you have the right “very particular set of skills” — our apologies to Liam Neeson — and probably especially if those skills are backed by a certification, then you’re likely to find work just about wherever you look for it. Not only that, but many IT jobs are work-from-home gigs that don’t require your presence at a physical office.

Given the manner in which the global COVID-19 pandemic has redrawn traditional workplace boundaries, there may not be as much to gain from a state-by-state comparison of IT salaries as there once was. Workers in general, and IT workers in particular, aren’t as tied to a single physical location as used to be the case. Certainly that’s the case across the current pandemic-scrambled employment landscape.

On the other hand, it’s always interesting to see where, on average, the highest IT earners tend to be clustered. And in drawing that data out of our most recent annual Salary Survey, we also detected the possible presence of IT hotspots: states that produced the largest numbers of survey respondents.

As noted elsewhere in our survey findings, the average annual salary across all Salary Survey participants who are certified IT professionals and live in the United States last year was $120,270. So how does that look when you compare individual states?

Out of the more than 4,000 certified IT professionals to take the survey at the end of last year, 53 percent live mostly in 43 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. (We got dramatically limited participation from eight states — Delaware, Hawaii, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming — and the territory of Puerto Rico.)

In sketching the IT employment landscape of America, we’ve ranked every state that supplied at least 1 percent of our total U.S. survey population. The remaining states are given in a separate list, with the caution that smaller samples produce less reliable data. Call this divide our A-List, and our B-List.

With all that said, where in America did we end up in our search for the most robust average annual salary figures?

U.S. STATES BY AVERAGE ANNUAL SALARY (A-List)

Note: Total of surveyed individuals from each of these states is equal to or greater than 1 percent of the total number of U.S. survey respondents.

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U.S. STATES BY AVERAGE ANNUAL SALARY (B-List)

Note: Total of surveyed individuals from each of these states is less than 1 percent of the total number of U.S. survey respondents.

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