Quality Assurance Engineer Salary Benchmarks

QA Engineers typically earn 10–20% less than Software Engineers at equivalent seniority levels, but the gap narrows significantly for those with strong automation, performance testing, or security testing skills. At some companies the titles are converging under "Software Engineer in Test."

QA Engineers typically advance to Senior QA Engineer, QA Lead, or transition into DevOps or software engineering roles. Those with strong technical skills may move into platform engineering or test architecture.

Equity for QA Engineers is less common than for software engineers but is present at growth-stage SaaS companies. At a median base of $81,344, total compensation at well-funded companies typically runs 15–25% above base when equity and bonuses are included.

On a median base salary of $81,344, a Quality Assurance Engineer at a US SaaS company makes about $6,779 a month, $3,129 every two weeks, or $39.11 an hour over 2,080 working hours a year. The middle half of salaries (25th–75th percentile) works out to $3,600–$8,750 a month. These are base-pay equivalents before tax, and they leave out bonus, commission, and equity.

Expect the lower half of this benchmark. Across 177 verified SaaS Quality Assurance Engineer salaries, the 25th percentile is $43,200 and the median is $81,344. A Quality Assurance Engineer at a seed or Series A startup, or at a bootstrapped company under roughly $10M ARR, will often land between those two figures. Base pay typically moves toward and past the $105,000 75th percentile as the company adds headcount and ARR. Those stage bands are a rule of thumb applied to this benchmark, not a breakdown by company size, which the dataset does not report.

Budget for more than base salary. On a median base of $81,344, the fully loaded cost of a US Quality Assurance Engineer is roughly $101,680–$113,882 per year once employer payroll taxes (~7.65% FICA plus federal and state unemployment), health and retirement benefits, software seats, and equipment are added. That 1.25–1.4x multiplier is a planning rule of thumb applied to the benchmark on this page, not a surveyed cost figure. Commission, bonuses, and equity sit on top where the role carries them. Also budget one-off hiring costs: agency recruiting fees commonly run 15–25% of first-year base, and a new hire takes weeks to months to reach full productivity.