Silicon Valley is a region that is located in the south of the San Francisco Bay, which is in the state of California, USA. It was nicknamed this way due to the large concentration of large technology companies that have worldwide influence. Among them are Google, Meta (formerly Facebook), Apple, Netflix, among others.
Due to the Dodd-Frank Act, publicly traded companies were required to report the average annual salary of their employees. According to the SFGATE website, filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission show that Silicon Valley workers earn very well. Get a better understanding of the disclosed data and what it means next.
Which Silicon Valley companies pay the highest salaries?
According to filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, in 2021 the company with the highest average annual salary was Google, with $295,884. The calculation is made by excluding the salary of the company’s CEO, plus bonuses and shares that employees may have in the company. Check below the ranking of the average salary of employees in the year 2021 of the main companies in Silicon Valley, according to the SFGATE website.
- Google $295,884
- Meta (formerly Facebook) $292,785
- Okta $258,687
- Dropbox $257,164
- Twitter $232,626
- Nvidia $217,542
- Netflix $201,743
- Apple $68,254
- Amazon $39,677
25% of Silicon Valley’s population owns 92% of the region’s wealth
In February 2022, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that according to an annual report by Joint Venture Silicon Valley, a non-profit company, it found that 25% of Silicon Valley’s population holds 92% of the region’s wealth. Company president Russell Hancock says:
If Silicon Valley were a country, this kind of wealth disparity would be considered politically unstable.
According to the Silicon Valley Business newspaper, a report by Automatic Data Processing Inc., the top 5% of Silicon Valley’s top annual salaries averaged $692,341 in 2021. By contrast, the region’s lowest annual salaries were at just $43,344. Compared to the US average annual salary of $24,552 a year, the earnings of Silicon Valley workers are still high.
