The highest-earning Googlers are so well paid it would take decades for ordinary people to catch up — but some of them say they should earn more (2024)

Sirena Bergman

Updated July 21, 2023 at 10:36 PM·2 min read

A spreadsheet showing what thousands of Google employees make has come to light for all to see.
The best paid are software engineers, and the highest level ones can take home nearly $1 million in total compensation.
Yet many Google employees think they're underpaid.

We all knowGoogle pays well, which may be why it has a reputation for being so hard to get a job there.

Now, thanks to a spreadsheet obtained by Insider's Rosalie Chan, Madison Hoff, and Hugh Langley, we know exactly how much its employees are taking home.

The TL;DR is that Googlers can expect to be paid pretty well.

Yet the company's annual "Googlegeist" survey for 2022 indicated that just 60% of workers surveyed felt their pay was "fair and equitable," down from 66% in 2021.

For some of these salaries, that might feel understandable.

Someone working in cloud sales for example could have a base salary of $50,000, although that ranges up to $302,000. A job in technical operations starts at $47,000, while the minimum base salary for an admin assistant is $67,509.

Per some very back-of-the-envelope math, these kinds of lower-tier salaries hover around US national median earnings. A like-for-like comparison is difficult, given Google's total compensation figures can include bonus and equity, but the Bureau of Labor Statistics reportsthe median US wage is $1,100 a week, equating roughly to $57,200 a year. In 2021, real median household income was $70,784, per census data.

But many Googlers earn far above this. The median total compensation for a Google employee in 2022 was $279,802. The highest-paid software engineers can make up to $718,000 a year in base salary, although most reported making between $100,000 to $375,000 in base salary. They can also receive bonuses of up to $605,000. This would put them in the top 1% of earners in the country.

According to the leaked data, the highest paid software engineers had a total compensation package of over nearly $1 million when factoring in equity and bonuses.

Continuing our rudimentary math, which doesn't account for taxes, someone earning the median average US salary would have to work for several decades before saving what a top Googler could theoretically earn in a year.