Help bring even more salary transparency to South African tech. Take the 2025 State of the Developer Nation survey!
In a competitive and fast-moving industry, benchmarking tech salaries is tough, and borderline impossible without reliable salary data. Over the past six years, South Africa’s tech community has helped create salary transparency with OfferZen’s State of Developer Nation surveys and reports.
Here, we unpack salary trends using data from over 18685 software developers and explore why salary transparency is even more important moving forward.
Seniors were the biggest winners of the post-Covid tech boom
Since OfferZen’s first Developer Nation Survey, the COVID-19 pandemic has been the most significant event on tech salaries. The pandemic accelerated a shift towards digitisation and drove many people to adopt new habits in work and play: working, spending, learning, and socialising online more than ever before.
This sudden tech boom meant that companies scaled rapidly and demand for developers reached record highs, especially for seniors. That’s reflected in the data:
Between 2021 and 2022, salaries for senior developers increased by 14.4% as companies competed for experienced candidates.
At the same time, intermediate developers also benefited from a 10.6% salary increase. Juniors, on the other hand, were the only group to see their salaries decrease during this period.
However, entry-level developers saw their luck change as demand for seniors began to outstrip supply.
This led companies to look for less experienced team members to help them scale in the post-COVID period, which gave juniors a massive swing in their average salaries:
Between 2022 and 2023, salaries for developers with fewer than 2 years of experience increased by 19.4%.
Unfortunately, this didn’t last as the hottest-ever tech hiring market began to cool down.
Salary growth slows as the global cooldown continues
2023 saw the start of a global tech hiring cooldown, as difficulties in fundraising and layoffs rocked the tech market, especially in the United States and Europe.
South Africa initially avoided the worst of the initial cooldown: average salaries increased across the board for developers in 2023.
This changed as the cooldown continued into 2024:
Developers’ salary growth slowed across the board, while salaries for entry-level developers decreased by 3.5%.
The effect of the slowdown can be seen on salary growth for senior developers:
Despite demand for senior developers remaining strong in 2024, senior developers with 6 years of experience saw their salary growth halve over the past 12 months.
At the same time, seniors with more than a decade of experience under their belts saw their salary growth stagnate year-on-year.
If we factor inflation into the mix, slowing salary growth is causing many developers to see a reduction in their buying power.
South African tech – and salaries – is at a crossroads
So, what does this mean for developer salaries heading into 2025? For starters, South African tech is at a crossroads.
While we’ve passed the worst of the cooldown, tech jobs are still down from their peak and competition for open roles is tougher than ever.
Finding reliable salary data and increasing tech salary transparency is more important than ever to help developers and companies navigate salary conversations in a tough hiring market.
You can help build South Africa’s largest tech salary dataset by taking the 2025 State of the Developer Nation survey.