The 20 Highest-Paying IT Skills By Salary: 2024 Dice Report

Here are the 20 highest-paying skill sets in the U.S. by average salary, including Kubernetes, SAP HANA, Docker, Elasticsearch, SOA and PostgreSQL.

If you’re an IT professional with one of the top skill sets on Dice’s new 2024 report, you can make an average salary of around $129,000 or more.

From SAP HANA, Docker and Amazon RDS to Elasticsearch, Redis and PostgreSQL—there are 20 IT skills that employers are willing to pay a high salary.

“Data-related skills remained in high demand, resulting in high salaries for tech professionals with a grasp of the languages, tools and abilities necessary to build and iterate data infrastructure at scale,” said Dice in its new 2024 Dice tech salary report.

Thanks to the increasing availability of data and cloud tools, data-related skills tend to bring in the highest salary on average in the tech industry. These data and database experts enable companies to harness and analyze data to create business outcomes.

Dice: ‘Data Means The Difference Between Failure’ And Success

“From small businesses to large enterprises, there’s a rising awareness that data means the difference between failure and market-beating success,” Dice said.

For example, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) offers a way for teams to reduce development resources, improve agility, and even increase scalability. Skills like Docker and Platform-as-a-Service (PAAS) are necessary for building out the next-generation infrastructure that organizations will need, including the integration of AI, advanced automation and data analytics. Without reliable databases, networks and cloud platforms, organizations cannot implement any of the other technologies needed to advance their strategies, according to Dice.

“Those who can successfully build out data and cloud infrastructure to take advantage of the next generation of AI tools and services will find themselves at an even greater advantage [in 2024],” said Dice.

The 2024 Dice salary report was administered online by Dice.com among registered Dice job seekers and site visitors between Aug. 30, 2023 and Oct. 31, 2023. A total of 6,166 U.S.-based respondents completed the survey.

CRN breaks down the top 20 highest-paying IT skills based on Dice’s 2024 report that employers are seeking. All figures represent an average salary that the skill sets command.

No. 20: Amazon RDS

Average Salary: $129,057

Cracking into the top 20 skill sets based on salary is Amazon’s Relational Database Service (RDS). The database service aims to make it easier to set up, operate and scale relational databases in the AWS cloud.

Professionals who have an Amazon RDS skill set make a $129,057 salary on average. This is down 3.4 percent in salary compared to 2022.

No. 19: Redis

Average Salary: $129,719

At No. 19 is Redis, a popular open source, in-memory, NoSQL data store commonly used as a database, cache and message broker. Redis stands for Remote Dictionary Server.

IT experts who are skilled in Redis generate an average salary of $129,719. This represents a 7.5 percent decrease in salary compared to last year.

No. 18: ETL

Average Salary: $129,771

ETL stands for extract, transform and load. This is a three-phase process data engineers use to combine data from multiple sources into a large, centralized repository data warehouse.

Professionals who own an ETL skill set generate an average salary of $129,771. This is up 1.7 percent compared to 2022.

No. 17: Load Balancers

Average Salary: $129,776

At No. 17, load balancers refer to experts in charge of efficiently distributing incoming network traffic across a group of backend servers. The goal is to improve application performance by reducing network latency.

IT experts who are skilled in load balancing capture an average salary of $129,776. This represents flat growth year on year.

No. 16: OLTP

Average Salary: $130,091

Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) is a type of data processing that consists of executing several transactions that occur concurrently, such as with ecommerce or online banking. This enables the execution of large amounts of database transactions by a large number of people.

Professionals who possess an OLTP skill set capture $130,091 in average annual salary. This is down 3.9 percent year on year.

No. 15: Jenkins

Average Salary: $130,169

At No. 15, Jenkins is an open-source automation server that lets developers reliably build, test and deploy their software. The Java-based platform has plugins designed for continuous integration.

IT experts who are skilled in Jenkins generate an average salary of $130,169 per year. This is down 1.1 percent compared to 2022.

No. 14: SOAP

Average Salary: $130,685

Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) is a messaging protocol for exchanging structured information, enabling the distributed elements of an application to communicate.

Professionals who own a SOAP skill set generate an average salary of $130,685. This represents flat growth year on year.

No. 13: NoSQL

Average Salary: $130,822

At No. 13, is the highly popular NoSQL database management which is purpose-built for specific data models. NoSQL databases are used in web applications and big data due to their high scalability and availability.

IT experts who are skilled in NoSQL generate an average salary of $130,822. This is down 3.1 percent compared to 2022.

No. 12: Confluence

Average Salary: $130,952

At No. 12, Confluence is a knowledge base software platform leveraged by support and IT teams. Created by software company Atlassian, Confluence can be used for technical documentation, team workspace, DevOps tools and to create a centralized knowledge base.

Professionals who own a Confluence skill set capture an average salary of $130,952 per year. This represents an increase if 1.5 percent compared to 2022.

No. 11: PostgreSQL

Average Salary: $132,078

Dubbing itself as the world’s most advanced open source database, PostgreSQL is an object-relational database management system. PostgreSQL emphasizes extensibility and SQL compliance.

IT experts who are skilled in PostgreSQL generate an average salary of $132,078. This is up 1 percent year on year.

No. 10: Apache Kafka

Average Salary: $132,103

Making it into the top ten on Dice’s list is the popular distributed data store and stream-processing platform Apache Kafka, developed by the Apache Software Foundation. The open source system is optimized for ingesting and processing streaming data in real-time.

Professionals who own an Apache Kafka skill set capture an annual salary of $132,103. This salary is down 7.5 percent compared to 2022.

No. 9: RDBMS

Average Salary: $132,184

The software used to store, query, manage and retrieve data stored inside a relational databased is called RDBMS, which refers to a relational database management system. The RDBMS provides an interface between people and the applications and database, along with administrative functions for managing data access and storage.

IT experts who are skilled in RDBMS generate $132,184 for an average salary. This is down 3.6 percent year on year.

No. 8: Kubernetes

Average Salary: $132,985

Kubernetes is an open-source system for automating the development, scaling and the overall management of containerized applications.

Professionals who own a Kubernetes skill set generate an average salary of $132,985. This is down 4.4 percent year on year.

No. 7: KornShell

Average Salary: $132,995

At No. 7, KornShell is an interactive command interpreter and command programming language for Unix. KornShell enables IT teams to perform a command substitution.

IT experts who are skilled in KornShell capture a average salary of $132,995 per year. This salary is up 2 percent compared to 2022.

No. 6: REST

Average Salary: $134,026

REST stands for Representational State Transfer. It is a software architecture that imposes conditions on how an API should operate. REST provides standards between systems in order to make it easier for system to communicate and interoperate with each other.

Professionals who own a REST skill set generate an average salary of $134,026. This salary is down 1 percent compared to 2022.

No. 5: Docker

Average Salary: $135,055

Cracking into the top five on Dice’s list Docker, a platform to help developers build, share, and run container applications. Docker is used to automate the deployment of applications in lightweight containers to boost app efficiency.

IT experts who are skilled in Docker capture an average salary of $135,055. This is down 1 percent year on year.

No. 4: Elasticsearch

Average Salary: $135,541

Built on Apache Lucene, Elasticsearch is a open source search and analytics engine. Elasticsearch is typically used for full-text search, security intelligence, business analytics and log analytics.

Professionals who own an Elasticsearch skill set capture an average salary of $135,541 per year. This is down 6 percent year on year.

No. 3: PaaS

Average Salary: $135,868

Platform as-a-Service (PAAS) is a cloud computing service model that offers a flexible platform to develop, deploy, operate and manage applications. PaaS looks to enable development teams to build, test and scale apps faster and more cost-effectively.

IT experts who are skilled in PAAS generate an average salary of $135,868. This salary represents a decrease of 3.1 percent compared to 2022.

No. 2: SAP HANA

Average Salary: $137,626

HANA is a popular relational database management system created by software giant SAP. The database runs the most up-to-date versions of SAP software, such as SAP S/4 Hana.

Professionals who own an SAP HANA skill set capture an average salary of $137,626 per year. This represents flat growth year on year.

No. 1: Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)

Average Salary: $137,917

The highest-paying IT skill set on Dice’s list is service-oriented-architecture (SOA). SOA is a software development model that uses software components called services to create business applications. SOA defines a way to make software components reusable and interoperable via service interfaces.

Dice said SOA offers a way for technology teams to reduce development resources, improve agility, and even increase scalability.

IT experts who are skilled in SOA generate an average salary of $137,917. This salary represents a decrease of 3.4 percent compared to 2022. Last year, SOA also ranked No. 1 for the skill set with the highest-paying salary.