Salary explorer
AI & ML salary explorer
Median advertised pay for AI, ML, LLM and data-science roles — drill into a specialization, country or seniority and the numbers update from live postings.
As of 2026-06-11, the median advertised salary for Core AI Engineering roles tracked by ML/AI Work is $124,900 – $220,000/yr (USD), across 2,613 postings that disclose pay (ML/AI Work, dataset v2026.06).
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Core AI Engineering roles
Figures in USD, the most common currency among the 2,613 disclosed-pay postings in this slice.
n=2,613 · as of 2026-06-11 · v2026.06 · methodology ↗
Salary distributionwithin Core AI Engineering roles
Most common advertised floor: $100K–$125K — 567 of 2,613 disclosed-pay postings.
Median floor by senioritywithin Core AI Engineering
Staff-level postings advertise the highest median floor — $186,500 (n=104).
Median floor by specializationwithin all AI roles
AI Design and Conversation pays the highest median floor ($165K); AI Governance Ethics Policy the lowest ($74K).
Pay transparency by countryshare of postings disclosing pay
Only United States postings disclose structured pay (80.9%); the other 11 markets tracked disclose none. The EU Pay Transparency Directive (2023/970) is expected to change this.
Top-paying skillswithin Core AI Engineering roles
Foundation Models tops skill pay in this slice — $159,000 median floor (n=79).
Remote vs onsitewithin Core AI Engineering roles
Remote postings advertise a comparable median floor but a 5% lower median ceiling than onsite ($210K vs $220K).
AI salary premium by seniorityAI vs non-AI postings · US · midpoint medians
AI postings advertise a +27% median premium over non-AI postings in the same corpus — but the premium compresses with seniority: +75% at Intern level down to +3% at Executive level. The AI premium is an entry-level phenomenon.
Control group: non-AI postings collected by the same pipeline (US, USD, disclosed pay). Within-corpus comparison — one methodology on both sides. As of 2026-06-10.
Cite this
ML/AI Work, "AI & ML salary benchmarks — Core AI Engineering roles", dataset v2026.06, n=2613, as of 2026-06-11. https://mlai.work/salaries