The 10 highest tech salaries in Australia salaries

Tech suffered its worst year for vacancies in 2024, recruiters say, but the big pay packets could make a comeback in 2025. These are the top 10 roles still paying over $200,000.

Tech salaries continue to top the highest paying jobs in Australia and recruitment companies expect a rise of two to three times the rate of inflation in 2025.

Australians managing IT infrastructure have enjoyed the highest average salaries in the tech sector across country for the past three years, earning an average of $231,000.

Enterprise architects, who structure a company’s IT, have again topped a list of the nation’s highest tech workers, followed by big data architects and program managers, who earned $220,000 and $210,000 respectively.

Technology workers continue to take home some of the largest salaries in the country, according to Talent’s 2025 Salary Guide, which analysed the nation’s highest earners in 2024.

The company’s managing director Matthew Munson said despite tech’s high packages, 2024 was one of the worst years on record for hiring in the tech sector.

“The market’s been very flat. It’s probably been one of the worst years, if not the worst year, for job vacancies in the tech sector for as long as I’ve been recruiting,” he said.

 

Mr Munson said there were more job ads during the dotcom bust in the 2000s than there were in 2024.

But that is expected to change quickly, with Talent one of several firms expecting interest rates to drop and employee confidence to rise in 2025.

Talent predicts salaries will surge as much as two to three times CPI levels in 2025 as employees regain confidence to switch roles.

“My best guess would be probably an increase somewhere between six and 10 per cent over the course of this year,” Mr Munson said.

Of Talent’s 2024 salary data, cloud architects earned the fourth highest salaries at $209,000 last year, followed closely by engineering managers at $208,000 and security operations centre (SOC) managers, who earned $205,000.

Cyber security managers followed with $202,000, the same as 2023, and application solutions architects and technical salesforce architects earned an average of $200,000.

Cyber security architects, who previously earned an average of $222,000 in last year’s data have taken a major cut, having dropped to $200,000.

Australia’s AI market will surge in 2025, according to Mr Munson, who said Talent had just been contracted to hire teams of up to 300 staff per project for 10 major corporations. That would lead to AI salaries surging as companies compete for talent.

“The one thing that we probably are likely to see more of is at the moment AI jobs don’t really feature in the top 10,” he said.

“I think that will start to come through this year. We’re already hearing of quite a few large projects that are starting to kick off that will start to push salaries up in that space.”

Artificial intelligence salaries are expected to rise as more companies test and embed AI-powered products this year.

While recruitment had slowed across the board for tech in 2024, Talent expected worker mobility to rise throughout the year and in turn spark a salary war, with companies bumping up offers to outcompete their rivals.

“We’re expecting to see quite a lot more activity this year and there’s a lot of factors impacting that, particularly talk about interest rates coming down,” he said.

“One of the downsides of high interest rates from a tech point of view is it encourages investors to keep their money in the bank rather than to invest in start-ups.

“As soon as you see that grassroots investment within technology start-ups come back, that impacts the rest of the sector because people will start leaving their corporate jobs to get back into start-ups.”

Scores of companies would also look to fill empty desks from cost-cutting programs, with may realising they had cut too deep, he said.

“I think what we’re seeing now is that a lot of organisations have realised that they’ve cut as far back as they can and their businesses are now starting to struggle,” Mr Munson said.

Originally published as The 10 highest tech salaries in Australia salaries