Wednesday, June 29, 2005

IA/UX Salary Surveys

Based on a recent request on the IA Institute Job Board, I have compiled some IA/UX salary information resources. As soon as the IAI salary survey comes out, I'll post a link here.

Very few of the postings I receive on the IA Institute Job Board have salary information, but a typical salary/rate conversion is:
salary = 2/3 rate times 2080 (40 hours per week for a year)

The 1/3 reduction represents the cost of your medical, vacation and other benefits plus social security taxes that the company pays.

For $75/hour, this equals $104,000/year, which appears to be on the high end for those jobs where I do have salary data. Salary.com shows salary+bonus capping around 110K for most experienced IA/UX type jobs, although their job titles don't conform perfectly to the industry yet.

The IA Institute is supposed to publish the results of the 2005 survey this month. They are a bit behind schedule, but keep looking for the survey at http://www.iainstitute.org.

Some other surveys:

2004 UX Salary Survey
http://www.spiritsoftworks.com/resources/2004-salary-survey.htm

2003 AIfIA Salary Survey
http://iainstitute.org/pg/salary_survey_2003.php

IA Wiki - links to more salary surveys
http://www.iawiki.net/SalarySurveys

Salary.com Salary Wizard
http://www.salary.com/salary/layoutscripts/sall_display.asp

Since Salary.com job titles don't appear to reflect titles used in the IA industry, here are some equivalent job titles:

Interface Designer = User Experience & HCI
Content Engineer = Information Architect