Tech Pay Stops Rewarding Experience at Exactly 10 Years
Employers advertise a salary and, often, a required number of years. Put 25,392 US postings that state both next to each other and the shape is unambiguous.
Pay climbs steadily for a decade and then stops. $227,500 at 10 years. $227,500 at 11–12 years. Then it edges down.
Controlling for role and state, each year of required experience up to 10 is worth +5.3%. Each year beyond is worth −1.8% (p=1.9e-26). Under a stricter specification that also controls seniority — arguably over-controlling, since seniority is how experience gets paid — it comes out +2.4% then −0.1%, statistically indistinguishable from zero. Flat either way.
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Employers barely ask for more
| the posting asks for more than | share of postings |
|---|---|
| 5 years | 37.5% |
| 10 years | 4.5% |
| 15 years | 0.89% |
| 20 years | 0.03% |
Twenty-plus years of experience is a requirement in seven postings out of 25,392.
Why this is not the same as "seniors can't get hired"
It isn't a claim about who gets hired — it's about what the advertised ladder rewards. Two readings are consistent with it, and this data cannot separate them:
Employers may genuinely value a 20-year engineer more but have no way to say so in a requisition, because "10+ years" is where the template stops. Or the market may have concluded that the marginal decade adds little it will pay for.
What the numbers do settle is that the stated ladder ends at ten. If you are fifteen or twenty-five years in, the back half of your career is not being priced — and that is a fact about job ads, not about you.
One honest caveat. Postings requiring 16+ years are excluded from the chart because 74% of that bucket is a single employer, which is a composition artifact rather than a market rate.
Where this sits
This is one of three findings from the same dataset:
- This post — pay stops rewarding experience at ten years
- Your skills don't expire, your tools do — named technologies collapse while general capabilities endure
- Job titles explain under 10% of required skills — what a title actually predicts