Salary Survey

The IA Institute produces an annual salary survey, capturing information on compensation, daily work habits and demographics. Learn what members of the IA Institute, sigia-l, and the ia-cms list reported and see the trends in IA titles, salaries, and activities. We present summary data and a downloadable Excel file of the full results, including open-ended responses.

Read our 2007 Salary Survey

Highlights of the 2007 survey include the following:

  • Of the 575 responses; 71.1%% were from USA, concentrating in the Northeast and Western states Of the remaining geographic regions, 6.8% were from the United Kingdom, 5.3% were from South America (mostly Brazil), 4.4% from Canada and 3.9% from Australia/Pacific Rim.
  • The modal earning group is US$100,000-US$109,999, representing 10.8% of all respondents, a significantly larger percentage of respondents than any other earning category for this question.
  • Because the the Over US$150,000 group represents 5.2% of the total, we plan to expand this group in next year's survey.
  • This is the first year that we added a question on gender. The gender split is almost equal, with 49% female to 51% male. Also, female IAs on average make more than males (US$87,500 versus US$85,300). Looking closer, we found more males in both the Under US$20,000 and Over US$150,000 categories. Removing the upper and lower categories from the calculation, women still held a lead in salary earned; however, in neither case was the difference statistically significant. The modal response for both genders was US$100,000-US$109,999.
  • 56% of respondents are between the ages 31-40. 73% of respondents are between the ages of 26 and 40.
  • In Job Titles, 29.7% of respondents use the words "Information Architect" in their title (10.1% have some variation of "lead" or "chief" qualifying the "Information Architect" label). Other significant titles are User Experience Designer (9.7%), Chief/Lead/Senior User Experience Designer (6.0%), Interaction Designer (7.1%), Chief/Lead/Senior Interaction Designer 4.4% and Usability Engineer (3.4%).
  • Strategic IA (81.0%), User testing (80.9%) and other user research tasks (80.5%) were the most commonly cited tasks performed by respondents. Very few specific tasks make up more than 50% of anyone's working day. Interaction design, while mentioned by 75.8% of respondents appears to be a clear specialty, with 24.0% spending more than half their day on Interaction design tasks. The only other specialty task that comes close is Strategic IA, to which 10.3% of respondents devote at least half their day. Some respondents have requested that we add more management level tasks to next year's survey. Indeed, 73.9% of respondents have project management duties and more than half perform general business consulting and other non-IA administrative tasks.
  • In terms of job seniority, 41% of respondents have spent less than a year in their current job, 36.5% have stayed on 1-3 years and 17% have spent over 5 years at the same job.
  • Years experience as an IA was pretty flat with most groups hovering around 10% of total. The largest group was the over 10 years experience (14.9%)
  • Job perks typically included 11-15 vacation days and 7-9 public holidays. Top five benefits include health insurance (83.1%), life insurance, (67.9%), 401K or ither investment plan (66.4%), bonus (61.2%), and professional development (59.9%).

In addition to information on salary, we collect data on the following:

  • Age
  • Gender
  • Educational Level
  • Job Title
  • Annual Increase
  • Hours worked
  • Breakdown of Job Tasks
  • Vacation, Holidays and Other Benefits
  • Length of Time in Current Job
  • Length of Time in Field
  • Size of Company
  • Geographic Area

Past Salary Surveys:

This page was last modified on May 8, 2007 04:52 PM.