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A newly leaked spreadsheet has revealed just how wild salaries are at one of the most valuable companies on the planet.
Obtained by Business Insider, the spreadsheet compiled voluntarily-disclosed pay rates from some 600 Microsoft employees at various levels of seniority. While the tech giant employs over 220,000 people overall, it still provides a valuable snapshot into the work life at one of the largest tech firms in the game.
Because Microsoft uses a job level system to determine career tiers, the salaries vary wildly. On level 59 and 60 — roughly equivalent to entry-level software engineers — the base pay ranges from as little as $111,000 to as high as $155,500. Cash bonuses in this range could be zilch, though some reported them as high as $25,000.
Considering that the United States median income in 2025 was $53,010, that’s already an eye-watering amount of money. Even compared to starter wages for similar entry-level engineers, Microsoft appears to be on the high-end, with ZipRecruiter flagging an average starter salary of just under $105,000.
And that’s just the low end. At the levels 63 and 64, Microsoft workers can expect salaries starting at $136,400 all the way to $245,000, with bonuses as high as $60,000. At the principal or director level, people reported taking home as much as $280,000, with Clippy-twisting bonuses of $110,000.
Again, these figures are just a small window into a much larger organization, so take them with a grain of salt. Though these salaries paint a rosy picture, they don’t account for the very lowest rung of wage earners — typically contractors — who keep the offices clean or empty the trash cans.
And though these Redmond salaries may look high to many of us, not every industry professional is convinced.
On Blind, an anonymized but verified message board for tech industry professionals, numerous Microsoft insiders groused that their compensation doesn’t match their contributions to the company.
“I just had my rewards discussion and got gaslit that I should be satisfied with peanut compensation,” one Microsoft worker wrote. “After spending the entire year sacrificing personal time to handle off-hour incidents and getting constant praise I got handed these aggressively below average rewards and it feels like betrayal.”
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