High UX Salaries have Held Steady for 26 Years

Summary: After adjusting for inflation, salaries for UX professionals have been about the same from the earliest salary data in 1998 to the newest data collected this year. The gap between entry-level staff and senior UX professionals has grown in recent years, marking a noteworthy rise in the value of UX experience.

The latest salary survey for UX professionals shows an uptick in salaries in the United States as of the data collection period in April 2024. But the more interesting conclusion is that (after adjusting for inflation) UX salaries have been almost the same, with minor fluctuations, from 1998, when there were 21,000 UX professionals in the world, until now, when there are an estimated 3 million UX professionals in the world. (A growth of more than fourteen thousand percent.)

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This most recent salary survey was conducted by the company User Interviews, which is an excellent source for recruiting test participants for various types of user research studies (not just interviews, as their name might imply). Data was collected in April 2024 from 697 respondents. The study focused on user research practitioners, not all UX professionals. However, past studies have shown that researchers and designers tend to make about the same if they have the same talent and experience levels.

The United States emerges as a treasure island in the lucrative world of UX, whereas the rest of the world is still seeking its gold. (“Treasure chest” generated by Midjourney.)

You can read the full 2024 UX researcher salary findings on their website. One interesting result is that salaries are dramatically higher in the United States than in the rest of the world. The difference is so big that my only advice for any company recruiting UX talent is to focus your search on the 90% of the world’s UX professionals who work outside the US. Median salaries were more than twice as high in the US than in Germany and The Netherlands — countries usually considered expensive places to hire. And US salaries were almost 4 times higher than those in Poland.

You might think that this means you can employ four Poles for the price of one American. But I recommend hiring two exceptional Polish talents for the price of one average-talent American. Considering that the best UX people deliver at least 10 times the results of average UXers, you’ll be getting twenty times higher return on your money from the Poles.

Can this disparity endure? Over the long term, such pronounced gaps are patently unsustainable for getting the same work done. Higher salaries in the US were reasonable 25 years ago, when the US had much higher UX maturity than other countries, meaning that American UX professionals were like seasoned goldsmiths, offering refined craftsmanship compared to the shoddy work (on average, of course) delivered by staff in lower-maturity countries. The sands of time have softened these disparities, as many countries now boast high-maturity workplaces where UX professionals can hone their skills.

The most interesting to me is to compare the new data with older UX salary data, which I have done in the chart below. The graph only shows USA salaries because earlier studies mainly included respondents from the United States. All amounts have been adjusted for inflation to be stated in the purchasing-power equivalent of mid-2024 USD dollars.

Note that the chart does not show the raw numbers reported by each salary survey. Instead, I have subjected the data to regression analyses to identify the statistically likely starting salaries (for new graduates with no professional experience) and the median salaries after 5 years of professional UX work.

Data sources: 1998 ACM SIGCHI, 2000 UPA, 2001 NN/g, 2002 Peak Usability, 2003 HFI, 2004 Peak Usability & Spirit Software, 2005-2011 UPA, 2014-2021 UXPA, 2023-2024 User Interviews.

The most obvious conclusion is that UX salaries in the United States have remained roughly unchanged for 26 years after adjusting for inflation. The three main exceptions are:

• During the dot-com bubble around 2000, entry-level salaries reached unsustainable zeniths as companies scrambled to get online and hired any warm body who walked in the door. It took a few years for entry-level wages to return to more sensible levels, but down they came.

• There was a trend related to the Covid pandemic for experienced staff to get higher salaries. Starting salaries also increased by a smidgeon, but not by nearly as much as experienced folks pulled home during this period of intense growth of e-commerce and virtual services.

• After the 2021-2022 bubble burst, UX salaries dropped by 12%. The chart plots the salary drop in 2024, but in reality, UX salaries were mainly lowered in 2023. The chart shows the years when the salary statistics were collected. When asking people to report on their salaries in April 2024, the responses will mainly reflect 2023 hiring (for starting salaries) or salary adjustments (for experienced staff). Similarly, data collected in early 2023 will mainly reflect what happened in 2022, the last year of the bubble.

The experience premium (the extra money paid to people with more experience) has gradually widened over the last 26 years, a healthy trend. UX professionals do get much better at their jobs during the first 10 years, mainly due to the abject failure of the education system to prepare them for real-world demands adequately. So the first few years on the job mainly constitute basic training that people in other professions would have received in college. New hires are almost worthless at first (sorry, newbies), and you hire one for his or her potential the following year.

Currently, the early-career experience premium in the United States is about $10K per additional year of UX experience, so that’s the raise you should expect if you’re doing a good job.

The experience premium is justified because the UX profession intrinsically depends on patterns: recognizing user behavior patterns during research and understanding design patterns to know which one to pick for each user behavior pattern. A vast range of patterns exists in both cases, so it takes a decade to learn enough for peak UX performance.

In most UX salary studies, the experience premium drops after around 10 years of experience, which also makes sense. Yes, there’s always more to learn. Still, going from, say, 13 years of experience to 14 years of experience only adds marginally new knowledge, while some of the knowledge accumulated 14 years ago will grow stale or obsolete.

So for the last 26 years, UX professionals have realized rapid salary growth for the first 10 years of their career, followed by low salary growth during subsequent years.

Will this trend continue in the future? Usually, past patterns are likely to continue when they have been stable for 26 years. But introducing useful AI tools within the UX process may profoundly alter the dynamic. AI prolongs old knowledge workers’ useful careers, which may be more game-changing for UX professionals than for other professions.

Generative AI takes over much of the heavy lifting in producing many alternate design ideas and possible explanations for research observations. This reduces the demands on fluid intelligence (a young person’s strength) while adding a premium on crystalized intelligence (an old person’s power) for winnowing the profusion of creative (but sometimes inane) AI contributions.

Thus, it’s likely that the UX experience premium will increase in the future and also that the premium for substantial experience (beyond the first 10 years) will grow even more due to AI.

Update for 2023 Q3

On August 22, 2023, the Wall Street Journal reported a recent decline in starting salaries within the United States, revealing a drop of 18% for developers and engineers, and an 11% decline for UX professionals, when compared to late 2022.

(This aligns with the 12% salary drop for UX professionals recorded after the full year’s salary drop had been realized. Comparing the two numbers indicates that most of the drop happened during the first half of 2023, with smaller drops later in the year. Anecdotal data seem to indicate that the situation has stabilized as of mid-2024.)

For those of us in the UX field, it's somewhat satisfying to note that our salaries have suffered a smaller reduction than those of developers. It's a telling sign of the importance and recognition of UX that a UX job was the lead example featured in a mainstream Wall Street Journal piece on the job market.

While the salary decline may be disheartening for recent graduates or anyone seeking a UX position in the latter half of 2023, I perceive this adjustment as a healthy normalization for the future of the UX profession. The indiscriminate hiring frenzy and inflated salary offerings in late 2022 were symptoms of a market that had lost its equilibrium, driven by relentless competition.

The key takeaway? We're returning to a familiar trend. UX salaries haven't disastrously plummeted but rather have realigned with historical norms. This adjustment is far from a calamity; we’re reverting to mean, which signifies stability and long-term health in the UX profession.

The pile of money paid to UX staff in the United States had become unsustainably high because of the feeding frenzy in the job market in late 2022, as companies were staffing up at any cost. During the second half of 2023, UX salaries have reverted to the mean, which still means generous compensation levels. There’s still gold in them thar UX hills, just not as much as in 2022. (“Money” by Leonardo.AI.)

About the Author

Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D., is a usability pioneer with 41 years experience in UX and the Founder of UX Tigers. He founded the discount usability movement for fast and cheap iterative design, including heuristic evaluation and the 10 usability heuristics. He formulated the eponymous Jakob’s Law of the Internet User Experience. Named “the king of usability” by Internet Magazine, “the guru of Web page usability” by The New York Times, and “the next best thing to a true time machine” by USA Today.

Previously, Dr. Nielsen was a Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer and a Member of Research Staff at Bell Communications Research, the branch of Bell Labs owned by the Regional Bell Operating Companies. He is the author of 8 books, including the best-selling Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity (published in 22 languages), the foundational Usability Engineering (27,133 citations in Google Scholar), and the pioneering Hypertext and Hypermedia (published two years before the Web launched).

Dr. Nielsen holds 79 United States patents, mainly on making the Internet easier to use. He received the Lifetime Achievement Award for Human–Computer Interaction Practice from ACM SIGCHI and was named a “Titan of Human Factors” by the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.

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