Asia Tech Salary Index
Engineering pay across fifteen tech hubs in twelve Asian markets by role and seniority, benchmarked against Silicon Valley, with hiring velocity and the skills employers are actually asking for. Q2 2026 data, updated September 2026.
India, Vietnam and the Philippines Are Setting the Pace
The fastest pay growth in Asia is now in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Ho Chi Minh City and Manila, where engineers working for international employers earn close to our rate-card ranges and 17 to 26 percent more than a year ago. North Asia and Singapore grew 5 to 12 percent from a much higher base. Treating Asia as one labour market no longer works.
Year-on-year pay growth for AI and ML engineers in Bengaluru, the fastest of the 15 hubs in the index
Saving on a five-person mid-level team built in Manila rather than the Bay Area, before employer contributions
Tech hubs across twelve Asian markets, from Bengaluru and Manila to Tokyo and Seoul, each benchmarked against Silicon Valley
What Moved in Q2 2026
1. India's Hubs Are Pricing Like Global Engineering Centres
Senior AI and ML engineers in Bengaluru now clear six figures, and Hyderabad is close behind. The driver is the same in both cities: global capability centres and product companies hiring for AI work at scale, and bidding against remote international employers for the same senior people. Pune follows at a small discount with a deep enterprise and cloud bench.
India still has the widest spread of any market in the index. A strong mid-level engineer and a weak one can sit on the same salary, which makes screening, not price, the deciding step.
The ROI of Hiring in Asia Has Moved
Three reasons now sit ahead of cost for most buyers: access to specialised AI and cloud talent that is scarce in the US and EU, a development cycle that runs while the US sleeps, and English-speaking teams that slot into a US workflow. Cost is the fourth reason, not the first.
2. Vietnam and the Philippines Priced Up for Foreign Employers
Engineers in Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi and Manila who work full time for international companies are paid well above local averages, and the gap is widening. Vietnam's shortage of senior backend, cloud and AI engineers keeps its growth near the top of the table. In the Philippines, strong English and AI training work pulled cloud and DevOps pay up fastest.
Both markets still cost 60 to 70 percent less than Silicon Valley at the same seniority. They are not cheap markets any more, but they are still the best value in the region.
3. North Asia and Singapore Are Mature and Steady
Tokyo, Seoul, Taipei, Hong Kong and Shanghai grew between 5 and 12 percent, and Singapore stayed the most expensive hub in Asia. These markets hire for specific depth, such as semiconductors in Taipei, gaming and consumer apps in Seoul, and quantitative finance in Hong Kong, rather than for scale.
For a US company building a team, they tend to work best for one or two senior specialists, with a delivery team in India or Southeast Asia around them.
Remote Hiring Settled Rather than Reversed
Remote and hybrid arrangements sit at 48 percent of the global workforce and have stopped moving in either direction. That equilibrium is what makes cross-border engineering hiring a normal operating decision rather than a pandemic artefact.
Hybrid dominates, with most employers landing on two or three remote days. The candidate side is less ambiguous: flexibility is now a screening criterion rather than a benefit.
Salary Benchmarks by Role and Market
Annual gross in USD equivalent, full-time employment, Q2 2026. For India, Vietnam, the Philippines and the rest of Southeast Asia the bands reflect what engineers earn working for international employers, in line with our developer rate cards. Employer social contributions, bonus and equity sit on top.
AI and ML Engineer Salaries
| Market | Junior (0-2 yrs) | Mid (3-5 yrs) | Senior (6+ yrs) | YoY |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BengaluruIndia | $46,000 | $78,000 | $118,000 | +24% |
| HyderabadIndia | $42,000 | $72,000 | $110,000 | +22% |
| PuneIndia | $38,000 | $65,000 | $100,000 | +20% |
| Ho Chi Minh CityVietnam | $40,000 | $65,000 | $92,000 | +21% |
| HanoiVietnam | $37,000 | $60,000 | $86,000 | +20% |
| ManilaPhilippines | $33,000 | $54,000 | $74,000 | +19% |
| JakartaIndonesia | $36,000 | $58,000 | $84,000 | +17% |
| Kuala LumpurMalaysia | $40,000 | $64,000 | $92,000 | +14% |
| BangkokThailand | $36,000 | $58,000 | $85,000 | +13% |
| Singapore | $78,000 | $118,000 | $170,000 | +9% |
| TaipeiTaiwan | $45,000 | $72,000 | $108,000 | +12% |
| SeoulSouth Korea | $48,000 | $74,000 | $110,000 | +10% |
| TokyoJapan | $58,000 | $88,000 | $130,000 | +8% |
| Hong Kong | $72,000 | $110,000 | $158,000 | +7% |
| ShanghaiChina | $70,000 | $105,000 | $150,000 | +11% |
| Silicon Valley | $130,000 | $170,000 | $232,000 | +8% |
Full-Stack Developer Salaries
| Market | Junior (0-2 yrs) | Mid (3-5 yrs) | Senior (6+ yrs) | YoY |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BengaluruIndia | $34,000 | $56,000 | $82,000 | +20% |
| HyderabadIndia | $31,000 | $52,000 | $76,000 | +19% |
| PuneIndia | $29,000 | $48,000 | $70,000 | +17% |
| Ho Chi Minh CityVietnam | $30,000 | $48,000 | $70,000 | +19% |
| HanoiVietnam | $28,000 | $45,000 | $66,000 | +18% |
| ManilaPhilippines | $25,000 | $40,000 | $58,000 | +17% |
| JakartaIndonesia | $25,000 | $41,000 | $60,000 | +16% |
| Kuala LumpurMalaysia | $28,000 | $45,000 | $66,000 | +10% |
| BangkokThailand | $26,000 | $42,000 | $62,000 | +9% |
| Singapore | $56,000 | $85,000 | $120,000 | +7% |
| TaipeiTaiwan | $34,000 | $54,000 | $80,000 | +8% |
| SeoulSouth Korea | $36,000 | $56,000 | $84,000 | +7% |
| TokyoJapan | $44,000 | $66,000 | $98,000 | +6% |
| Hong Kong | $52,000 | $80,000 | $112,000 | +5% |
| ShanghaiChina | $46,000 | $70,000 | $96,000 | +6% |
| Silicon Valley | $104,000 | $148,000 | $195,000 | +6% |
Cloud and DevOps Engineer Salaries
| Market | Junior (0-2 yrs) | Mid (3-5 yrs) | Senior (6+ yrs) | YoY |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BengaluruIndia | $38,000 | $62,000 | $90,000 | +26% |
| HyderabadIndia | $35,000 | $58,000 | $84,000 | +24% |
| PuneIndia | $32,000 | $53,000 | $78,000 | +22% |
| Ho Chi Minh CityVietnam | $30,000 | $49,000 | $72,000 | +24% |
| HanoiVietnam | $28,000 | $46,000 | $68,000 | +22% |
| ManilaPhilippines | $28,000 | $45,000 | $66,000 | +22% |
| JakartaIndonesia | $28,000 | $46,000 | $68,000 | +20% |
| Kuala LumpurMalaysia | $32,000 | $52,000 | $76,000 | +14% |
| BangkokThailand | $29,000 | $48,000 | $70,000 | +13% |
| Singapore | $62,000 | $94,000 | $132,000 | +9% |
| TaipeiTaiwan | $38,000 | $60,000 | $88,000 | +10% |
| SeoulSouth Korea | $40,000 | $62,000 | $92,000 | +9% |
| TokyoJapan | $50,000 | $76,000 | $110,000 | +7% |
| Hong Kong | $58,000 | $88,000 | $124,000 | +7% |
| ShanghaiChina | $52,000 | $80,000 | $108,000 | +8% |
| Silicon Valley | $120,000 | $162,000 | $212,000 | +9% |
Total Annual Cost of a Five-Person Engineering Team
Five mid-level full-stack developers, three to five years, twelve months, salary only.
Salary Is Not the Whole Cost
Employer contributions, recruitment, equipment and any entity or employer-of-record cost sit on top of every bar above, and they do not scale down in the same proportion. Our 2026 regional report prices the same hire fully loaded, which changes the ranking between some regions entirely.
Hiring Velocity and Market Dynamics
Average time to hire
16 days
Two days faster than Q4 2025
Offer acceptance rate
89%
Up two points year on year
Remote job postings
48%
Stable at the post-2023 equilibrium
AI role demand growth
+52%
Year on year across Asia
The Skills Being Asked For
Share of technical job postings in Asia naming each skill.
Updated September 2026
The Wider Market Context
Four longer-running trends sit behind the Q2 2026 bands above. Each should shape a hiring plan in Asia, and each comes from a source we can point at.
AI Training Became a Job Title, Not a Task
Cross-border AI trainer roles grew 283% during 2025, and the Philippines and India are two of the five largest hiring locations for them worldwide. This is a category that did not exist as a distinct line item when the Q1 bands were collected, and it pays on its own curve, between $15 and $75 an hour.
India's Supply Is Growing Faster Than Anywhere on Earth
India added 5.2 million new developers to GitHub during 2025, roughly one in seven of every new developer worldwide, and passed the United States on total open-source contributors for the first time. Demand is still ahead of it: AI roles are forecast to exceed 1.25 million by 2027 against a supply gap near 51%.
Enrolment Is Running Ahead of Proficiency
India leads the world in generative-AI course enrolments, 2.6 million and up 107% year on year, while ranking 89th of 109 countries on Coursera's overall proficiency measure. Vietnam ranks 33rd. The gap is the screening problem every hiring plan in Asia now has to solve.
English Rankings Did Not Move the Way People Assume
On the 2025 EF English Proficiency Index the Philippines scores 569 and ranks 28th worldwide, ahead of every Latin American market except Argentina. Vietnam sits at 500, India at 484, Indonesia at 471. Country scores describe adult populations rather than engineers, but the relative ordering is stable year to year.
Regional Deep Dive
India
Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Pune hold the largest engineering bench in Asia, and the fastest-growing one on GitHub. AI, data and cloud roles lead pay growth, driven by global capability centres and remote hiring by foreign companies.
A four to five hour overlap with UK and European mornings is easy. US overlap needs an early or late shift agreed up front. Screening matters more here than anywhere else in the index because the range inside a single band is so wide.
Vietnam
Vietnam has become Asia's third-largest startup ecosystem, and the shortage of engineers is the defining feature of the market rather than a temporary condition. Backend, full-stack and cloud roles all clear well above the local average, and the competition for them is global rather than domestic.
English is strong at the senior end, and a four to six hour overlap with the earlier part of a US day makes real-time collaboration workable without anyone working through the night.
Philippines
English fluency is the best in the region and among the best in the world, which is why Philippine engineers are consistently over-represented in customer-facing product work, technical writing and now AI training. E-commerce and fintech demand has grown fastest.
Cybersecurity and cloud are the fastest-growing role families. Attrition runs higher than the regional average, so retention needs to be designed in rather than assumed.
Indonesia
The largest domestic market in Southeast Asia, with a young engineering base growing quickly and a senior AI bench that is still thin relative to India or Vietnam. That combination makes it strong for scaling mid-level teams and harder for a single senior hire.
Jakarta concentrates the e-commerce, payments and logistics engineering work, and the cost position remains among the best in the region.
Malaysia and Thailand
Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok sit in the middle of the index on pay. Kuala Lumpur has good English and a growing base of regional hubs and data centres. Bangkok's strengths are fintech, e-commerce and mobile. Both are growing more slowly than Vietnam or the Philippines.
North Asia and Singapore
Singapore and Hong Kong are the regional pay ceiling and work best for leadership, regional headquarters and regulated finance roles. Tokyo and Seoul pay well below the Bay Area but hire mostly in Japanese and Korean, which narrows the pool for English-first teams.
Taipei is strong in hardware, semiconductors and embedded work. Shanghai has deep AI and product talent, though data rules and cross-border contracting add steps for foreign employers.
Take the Index with You
Every table, the cost model, the skills ranking and the full source list as a designed PDF.
Method
Collection period. 1 April 2026 to 30 June 2026. Bands for the Philippines, Vietnam, India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand are anchored on the Remote (Working for International Clients) ranges on our developer rate cards, which is what engineers there earn working full time for foreign employers. Tokyo, Seoul, Taipei, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore are benchmarked on public job-board postings and employer offers for the same roles.
What is counted. Full-time employment compensation, annual gross, converted to USD. Contractor and agency day rates are excluded because they price risk and overhead that a salary does not.
What is excluded. Employer social contributions, bonus, equity, recruitment fees and equipment. Employer burden alone runs from roughly 5 percent in India at senior pay to roughly 20 percent in China, which is enough to reorder two offers that look equal on salary.
Seniority. Junior is nought to two years, mid is three to five, senior is six or more. Titles are unreliable across these markets, so bands are assigned on scope of ownership rather than job title.
Limits. These are market ranges, not a census. The spread inside a single market is wider than the gap between some of the markets listed. Use the index to compare markets, then benchmark the specific role before making an offer.
Sources
- 01 Second Talent placement and offer data, 1 April to 30 June 2026.
- 02 Second Talent developer rate cards, Remote (Working for International Clients) ranges, September 2026.
- 03 Deel, State of Global Hiring Report 2026, covering over one million worker contracts across 150+ countries.
- 04 GitHub Octoverse 2025, The State of the Octoverse.
- 05 Coursera Global Skills Report 2025, 109 countries.
- 06 EF English Proficiency Index 2025, 123 countries and regions, 2.2 million test takers.
- 07 NASSCOM and Deloitte, India AI talent demand and supply analysis.
- 08 TopDev and ITviec, Vietnam IT Market and Salary Report 2025-2026.
- 09 Public job-board postings across the 15 Asian tech hubs covered, aggregated quarterly.
Related
- LATAM vs CEE vs Asia for hiring AI engineers fully loaded cost across three regions
- All research and PDFs every report and country guide
- Developer rate cards hourly and annual rates by role and market
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