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Software and IT services is the highest-paying industry

It pays to be in tech.

Rani Molla is a senior correspondent at Vox and has been focusing her reporting on the future of work. She has covered business and technology for more than a decade — often in charts — including at Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal.

It pays to be in tech.

Software and IT services is the highest-paying industry, with a median salary of $104,000 this year, according to LinkedIn’s 2017 U.S. State of Salary Report, which was released this morning.

It’s followed closely by the hardware and networking industries, which pay $101,000 per year. Compare that with the median wage for U.S. workers of $44,148 per year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Accordingly, studying computer science, which you’d need for a job in software and IT, results in the highest payout of any field of study, with an average salary of $92,000. Science, technology, engineering and math degrees, known as STEM, account for about half of the highest-paid fields of study, according to the report.

If that’s not enough to steer you into a tech job, the San Francisco Bay Area — home to Silicon Valley — is the highest-paying region to work in, with an average salary of $112,000.

LinkedIn’s report uses U.S. salary data from more than two million LinkedIn members as of April 2017.


This article originally appeared on Recode.net.