The Highest Paying Programming Languages in 2017

Every year since 2011, Stack Overflow conducts a survey to better understand the motivations, job search preferences, and career goals of professional developers. This year, over 64,000 respondents chimed in, making it the world's most comprehensive developer survey.

One thing we learned this year is that some of the fastest growing technologies are also the highest paying languages. To better understand what the types of developers you want to hire expect to be paid, here's a list of the ten highest paying languages to help you evaluate and adjust your current technical compensation strategy.

Top-Paying Languages in the US

1. Go- $110,000
2. Scala- $110,000
3. Objective-C- $109,000
4. CoffeeScript- $105,000
5. Perl- $105,000
6. C++- $100,890
7. R- $100,000
8. Swift- $100,000
9. TypeScript- $100,000
10. Python- $99,000

Languages like Go and Scala might not sound familiar to you, but they command higher salaries for a reason. Although the types of programmers who are ambitious enough to learn these technologies are often paid well, newer and more established companies alike have incorporated both as integral parts of their tech stacks.

In response, more developers than ever are learning these programming languages, which you can see in the charts below. Between 2009 and 2017, Go grew in popularity on Stack Overflow by 1200% and Scala’s popularity increased by 1250%.

Top-Paying Languages in Worldwide

1. Clojure- $72,000
2. Rust- $65,714
3. Elixir- $65,000
4. F#- $64,516
5. Go- $64,516
6. Perl- $63,068
7. Groovy- $61,809
8. Ruby- $60,000
9. Scala- $60,000
10. R- $57,125

Keep in mind that because some of the highest paying languages aren’t necessarily the most widely used, it’s important to evaluate developer candidates for their ability to learn new skills on the job, rather than their current level of expertise. When your current developers master one of these languages, make sure their compensation reflects the effort they’ve made to learn them.

If your company can’t afford these exact dollar amounts, don’t go out of your way to hide your salary ranges. Developers appreciate transparency from employers, especially when it comes to compensation. In a recent experiment, Dr. Dave Robinson, a Data Scientist here at Stack Overflow, said the team found that job listings that include a salary range got 60-75% more clicks—even when the compensation was slightly below market value.