How Much Does Google Pay?

Salary has been traditionally a taboo subject for most Americans to discuss. Most people would rather describe the most embarrassing moment of their lives than tell a coworker how much they make. But that is changing.

New regulations across the country, like New York City’s pay transparency law, are forcing employers to publish salary information for jobs publicly. While the information might not reveal an exact paycheck, it lets workers know where they stand relative to each other.

The average U.S. tech worker earned a record high of $104,566 in 2021. While that sum doesn’t take into account other forms of compensation, like stock options and equity, it does paint a picture of how lucrative working in the industry can be—by comparison, at the end of 2021, the average U.S. salary was just $1,010 a week or approximately $52,520 a year.

Google’s pay scale

Google is a sprawling organization with more than 100,000 employees. To keep track of its employees’ standing within the organization and growth, the company has implemented a level system to standardize the career ladder for its employees and create salary bands.

The tech giant’s system starts at level three (L3), which typically requires zero to one year of experience and progresses to L4, L5, L6, L7 and even L8 depending on experience. As employees move up the ladder, their roles grow in scope and can become more managerial. However, they also command bigger paychecks and titles. For instance, an L3 is an entry-level Software Engineer, while an L5 is generally a Senior Software Engineer and an L7 is a Senior Staff Software Engineer.

Software Engineer

According to crowdsourced data from Glassdoor, entry-level software engineers at Google can make more than $150,000 per year. Levels.fyi, a website dedicated to bringing transparency to Silicon Valley’s career ladders and salaries, places the number closer to $196,000. As software engineers climb through the ranks at Google their pay skyrockets—as an L8, Googlers’ salaries can creep into the six figures, with an average yearly pay of $1.03 million.

Hardware Engineer

Hardware engineers command a hefty intro salary at Google, much like their software-oriented counterparts. This talent, which works to design the next generation of Google-branded devices like its Pixel smartphone, can expect to earn $203,000 upon their entry into the company as an L3. Should they rise to an L7, this sum climbs to $667,000.

Product Designer

Product designers at the tech titan generally enter Google as an L3 with an average salary of $170,000. It’s not as much as their engineer peers, but it’s still much higher than the industry average. However, should a designer prove their worth, they can graduate to new levels within the company and eventually top out as an L7, earning around $546,000 per year, according to Levels.fyi’s data.

Recruiter

Google’s average entry-level salaries begin to fall outside of the company’s technical roles, and the recruiters who source the company’s tech talent can expect to earn $136,000 per year as an L3. Recruiters’ salaries do rise as they move up the chain of command, but not nearly as steeply as the technical talent they recruit. A recruiter at Google can expect to bring home $162,000 per year as an L4 and $238,000 as an L5.

Marketing

Young marketers typically enter the Mountain View, California-based company as an L3 collecting approximately $140,000 each year. The average marketing employee’s salary can climb to around $192,000 as a L4, $257,000 as an L5, $360,000 as an L6 and approximately $537,000 as an L7.

Sales

Google’s sales team helps the company generate revenue from its suite of enterprise products and services like its Google Cloud or Google Workplace. Compensation in a sales role is typically dependent on closing deals and collecting a commission. For this reason, it can be challenging to pin down how much the average salesperson can collect in a year.

However, Levels.fyi reports that L3 sales staff earn an average of $140,000 per year and can max out at around $516,000 as an L7. Glassdoor on the other hand, estimates the average compensation for an Account Manager on Google’s sales team is around $112,000, while an Account Executive earns a salary of about $130,000