USA Cloud & Infrastructure Salary Report 2026

Median pay by role runs from $105,000 for cloud network engineers to $173,500 for AI infrastructure engineers, a spread of about 65%. The ordering separates the work cleanly. The four highest medians are all design and build roles: AI infrastructure at $173,500, platform engineering at $159,110, cloud architecture at $154,500 and site reliability at $152,414. DevOps engineering follows at $144,787, just under the overall market median. Below that the table turns to running what has already been built. Cloud engineering sits at $135,000, infrastructure engineering at $132,336, cloud FinOps at $129,950, cloud operations at $125,000 and cloud network engineering at $105,000. Cloud engineer, the broadest title in the set, sits 8.4% below the market median, because the label covers a much wider band of work than the specialist titles above it. The feed carries no posting count per role, so treat the exact ordering as directional.

California leads states at $177,250, only 1.3% ahead of New York at $175,000, with Washington third at $165,500. Texas follows at $140,586, Illinois at $140,000 and Colorado at $135,000. Florida is at $122,800 and Georgia lowest at $117,000, giving a state spread of about 51%. Cities compress that range rather than widening it. San Francisco tops the list at $198,000, ahead of Seattle at $184,300 and New York at $177,375. Boston is at $163,500, Austin at $163,180, Los Angeles at $158,200, Atlanta at $149,500, Chicago at $145,000 and Denver lowest at $139,600. The city spread of about 42% is narrower than the state spread, the reverse of what the other reports in this series show. Austin is the case to look at: Texas as a whole sits 20.7% below California, yet Austin outpays Los Angeles. San Francisco runs 11.7% above the California state median for the same reason in the other direction. State medians pool metro and non-metro postings unevenly, so read both cuts as directional.

Across the months with enough disclosed pay to report, the posted median moves from $161,455 in February to $139,255 in July, a shift of about 14%. Read that as a change in what was posted, not as a change in what infrastructure engineers are paid. Only 44.1% of postings disclose a range, so every monthly point rests on that disclosed slice, and the mix of roles posted moves month to month. A month heavy in cloud operations postings shows a lower median than a month heavy in platform engineering, with no underlying pay movement at all. January is suppressed, at roughly 61 postings with a disclosed range against the floor of 100 we use before publishing a monthly point. May clears that floor but its volume of 469 postings sits well below the 1,290 in April and the 1,617 in June, and the same May trough appears in every industry pull we have run this year. Read the overall level rather than any single month.

Two figures in this section come from Glozo data that public salary sources do not publish. Against 6,761 active postings, the feed carries a measured talent pool of 92,250 cloud and infrastructure professionals in the United States. Divide one by the other and there are about 14 available professionals for every open role. That is the tightest market we have measured. Our cybersecurity report puts 119,998 people against 7,865 active postings, roughly 15 per opening, and recruiting puts 327,487 against 6,836, roughly 48. Postings clear in 10.3 days on average and the whole range is four days wide. Cloud FinOps roles stay open longest at 13.3 days, followed by cloud network engineering at 13.0 and cloud operations at 11.0. Platform engineering closes fastest at 9.3 days, with AI infrastructure at 10.0 and cloud architecture at 10.2. That ordering runs opposite to the scarcity story. Here the best paid roles close fastest and the lowest paid stay open longest, the reverse of what you would predict if time to fill tracked how hard a role is to find. The claim that survives is narrow: the roles lingering are operations and network roles, not the senior design roles. With a four-day spread across ten roles it is a real ordering but a small effect.

Full-time work accounts for 91.4% of postings. Contract roles are 7.0%, internships 0.8%, part-time 0.7% and temporary work 0.1%. That is almost identical to our cybersecurity report at 91.7% full-time, and both sit far above recruiting at 82.0% on the same feed. The reading consistent with the rest of this data is that employers treat cloud and infrastructure as standing in-house capability rather than project work, which matches an employer list led by hyperscalers, chip makers and banks rather than by agencies. The 0.8% internship share is the smallest formal entry route in this report, and it is the posting-side counterpart to the thin entry tier in the talent pool below.

Skill premiums point at the orchestration layer rather than at any cloud vendor. Kubernetes carries an 18% premium, service mesh 12%, AWS 10%, Terraform 8.2% and observability 8%. The order is the finding. Kubernetes pays close to twice what naming AWS does, and service mesh, the least widely held skill of the five, comes second. Three of the five are vendor-neutral, so what employers pay extra for is the ability to run workloads across infrastructure rather than familiarity with one provider's console. The role table reaches the same conclusion from a different cut of the same postings. Platform engineering, the role that owns Kubernetes and service mesh in most organisations, has the second-highest median at $159,110, while cloud network engineering sits at the bottom at $105,000. The drop-off across the skills table is also gentler than in our cybersecurity report, where the top two premiums stood far apart from the rest. Here the whole set is priced, which fits a market where the standard toolchain is settled.

The pool of 92,250 professionals sits high on the ladder. Specialists are 59.5% of it and experts 33.0%, so more than nine in ten measured professionals are in those two tiers. Leaders are 5.9%. Entry level is 1.6%, which is 1,495 people. That entry share is the thinnest we have measured, below recruiting at 2.0% and cybersecurity at 2.1%, and the expert share of 33.0% is the heaviest. The pay ladder says the same thing from the posting side: the step from entry to specialist is 94.1%, by a wide margin the steepest first step in any report in this series. For anyone hiring, the consequence is direct. There is almost no measured junior layer to promote from, the tier most job descriptions target is the tier every other employer is drawing from, and the market is paying a large premium to move someone across that first step rather than to grow into it.

The gender pay figures here come from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, not from Glozo postings. For the occupation group the feed reports against, BLS gives a median of $131,196 for men and $123,916 for women, a gap of 5.6%. The national gap across all occupations is 19.4%. Two limits are worth stating plainly. The BLS occupation group is far broader than cloud and infrastructure work, and its medians sit below the posted medians elsewhere in this report, so the two sets of numbers describe different populations and should not be read against each other. And Glozo does not collect gender data on candidates or postings, so no other figure in this report is broken out by gender.