The pay gap among software engineers in Indian cities is wider than ever, and new data from Levels.FYI puts it in clear perspective. According to the platform’s 2025 salary heatmap, Bengaluru dominates the chart with an average annual package of around Rs 35 lakh, while engineers in Ahmedabad earn less than one-fourth of that figure.

Level.fyi, a California-based company known for its salary transparency tools, has become a source of benchmark salaries for professionals around the world. The platform provides detailed compensation data across technical roles ranging from software engineers and product managers to hardware designers and sales professionals. Here’s everything you need to know about it.

Software engineer salaries revealed in various Indian cities, Bengaluru leads the charts

When it comes to software engineering salaries, Bengaluru clearly leads. The average annual salary of a software engineer in the city is Rs 34.98 lakh, followed by Hyderabad at Rs 30.26 lakh. Delhi NCR is at third place with Rs 21.38 lakh, while Pune and Mumbai are below Rs 20 lakh. The average rent in the southern tech hub of Chennai is Rs 18.29 lakh, while Kolkata and Ahmedabad lag behind with Rs 9.15 lakh and Rs 8.97 lakh respectively.

This essentially means that a software engineer in Bengaluru earns almost four times more than one in Ahmedabad, which shows how tech concentration and demand affects the pay scale in major cities of India.

Real-time, user-submitted salary data?

The data, available under the Salary Heatmap section on Level.fyi, allows users to explore the average salary by city, company and experience level. It also breaks down components like base salary, stock options, and bonuses through a graph. For Bengaluru, companies like Amazon, Google and Oracle emerged as top-paying employers.

Levels.fyi claims that its data is updated in real-time, meaning the figures may fluctuate slightly as more users share verified salary details. Because the data is crowdsourced, it offers a practical glimpse into what engineers actually earn.

Levels.fyi says 1.5 million professionals are using its website

Levels.fyi started as a side project in 2017 and has since grown to become one of the most trusted sources for compensation transparency. “Today, more than 1.5 million professionals use Level.FYI every month to find and evaluate their next job,” the company said in its blog. The platform was initially created to help job seekers compare career levels at different companies, a process that was often opaque within larger organizations.

In its early days, many employees joined only to discover that they had been placed at a lower level, in a lower pay band or role than expected. Levels.fyi says it aims to change this by making such internal structures visible. “As we collected leveling and salary information, we noticed that our data looked very different from what we saw at other sites,” the company wrote. The company wrote, suggesting that compensation data elsewhere was often “manipulated, out of date, or intentionally suppressed.”

What about authenticity and transparency?

To ensure accuracy, Level.fyi says it verifies submissions through external identity and identity verification processes, as well as “proof documents such as offer letters or W2 forms.” This helps maintain the integrity of salary data, although one should keep in mind that crowdsourced figures work best as guidance rather than absolute benchmarks.

beyond engineering salary

In addition to technical roles, the site covers a range of sectors including finance, biotechnology, healthcare and retail. It also has a comparative advantage feature, which lets job seekers see how companies like Google, Meta or Microsoft stack up in areas like health coverage, gym access, transportation and work-life balance.