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C++ Developer Salary and Equity Compensation in Startups 2026

C++ Developer Salary and Equity in 2026

How much can a C++ developer expect to make at US-based startups? The average estimated salary for C++ developers is 145k per year, with a range from 65k to 254k. The salary range for C++ developers varies depending on factors such as location, industry, experience, and startup stage.

144.9k

Average Salary

4 years

Average years of experience

Salary

The average salary for a C++ developer is$144,875, which is 12.3% higher than the average startup salary of$129,000. C++ developer salaries are based on exclusive Wellfound data. All data is updated on a weekly basis. Factors that may influence salary include: location, years of experience, title, size of company, and industry.

Top of market

$223,042/yr

Range $180k - $254k

Average

$144,875/yr

Range $110k - $173k

Below Average

$104,208/yr

Range $65k - $138k

Top Locations

The highest average salary a C++ developer can get in San Francisco Bay Area, that is $200,000. This pay is 38.1% higher than the average C++ salary in startups, which is $144,875. Salaries will vary based on your location. The top-paying markets in the US, on average, are currently: San Francisco Bay Area (avg $200,000 per year), London (avg $165,000 per year), Toronto (avg $165,000 per year). Remote jobs often pay based on the location you reside in.

San Francisco Bay Area

$200k

London

$165k

Toronto

$165k

Austin

$160k

Santa Monica

$155k

Remote

$150k

Industries

The highest average salary a C++ developer can get in Digital Entertainment, that is $445,000. This pay is 50.8% higher than the average C++ salary, which is $295,050. The highest-paying industries in 2023 are: Digital Entertainment (avg $445,000 per year), Ticketing (avg $350,000 per year), Capital Raising (avg $300,000 per year).

Tech Stack

Top Tech Stacks

The top-paying developer skills of 2026 are:

1. Celery
$202k
2. Clojure
$195k
3. OpenCV
$192k
4. Clojurescript
$187.5k
5. rundeck
$176.5k
6. react
$175k
7. Scipy
$175k
8. Symfony
$175k
9. RESTful APIs
$174k
10. Vue
$170k

Years of experience

Below Average

Average

Top of Market

The highest average salary a C++ developer can get with 10+ years of experience, that is $105,000. This pay is 18.6% lower than the average salary in startups, which is $129,000. The salary range varies with years of experience and depends on other factors such as skill set, size of company, and industry.

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Popular skills

.NET Adobe InDesign Adobe Photoshop Airflow Amazon ECS Amazon Kinesis Amazon S3 Amazon SQS Android Ansys Apache Tomcat Assembly Autocad AWS Azure Backbone Bootstrap Budgeting C C#C++Cassandra Celery Clojure Clojurescript Codeigniter D3.js Dart Deep Learning Digital Ocean Django Docker Drupal DynamoDB ElasticSearch Electron Elixir Ember.js Express.js Firebase Flask Flutter Fortran Framer GCP Go Gradle GraphQL Groovy Haskell Hbase Heroku Hibernate Invision Ionic Java Javascript jQuery Jupyter Kafka Keras Kotlin Kubernetes Laravel Lisp LTE Lua Machine Learning MAGENTO Matlab Microsoft Visio MongoDB Mongoose MySQL Nagios Neo4J Nest.Js Nginx Node.js Numpy Nuxt.Js Objective-C openAI OpenCV Pandas Perl PHP PostgreSQL Postman Principle Prometheus Prospecting Puppet Pyspark Python PyTorch Qt R Rabbitmq react React Native Redis RESTful APIs Ruby Ruby on Rails rundeck Rust SAS Scala scikit-learn Scipy Selenium Sequelize Sketch Solidity SOLR Spark Splunk Spring SQL SQLAlchemy SQLite Svelte Svn Swift SwiftUI Sybase Symfony TypeScript Unity Unity3D Unreal Verilog Visual Basic Vue Web3.Js WebAssembly WebGL WebRTC Websockets Xamarin Xcode Zeplin Zookeeper

Tech Hubs for C++

Austin Boston Chicago Denver Los Angeles San Diego Seattle London Vancouver Toronto Santa Monica Minneapolis Melbourne Cambridge San Francisco Bay Area Remote

C++ Developer Salary and Equity in 2026

$223,042/yr

$144,875/yr

$104,208/yr

San Francisco Bay Area

London

Toronto

Austin

Santa Monica

Remote

Los Angeles

Seattle

Minneapolis

New York

San Diego

Boston

Denver

Chicago

Top Tech Stacks

1. Celery

2. Clojure

3. OpenCV

4. Clojurescript

5. rundeck

6. react

7. Scipy

8. Symfony

9. RESTful APIs

10. Vue

Popular roles

Popular skills

Tech Hubs for C++

Industries for C++