What a software developer costs in China in 2026

275,504 yuan a year: that is the 2025 average for professional and technical staff at larger IT and software firms in China, in the National Bureau of Statistics release of May 15, 2026. It comes to about 22,959 yuan a month. It is an employee’s salary, not a freelancer’s price. The table sets out the official series by region.

The official developer wage table, October 2026 edition. 2025 wages. Monthly and per-day columns are our arithmetic. Dollars at the CFETS central parity of October 16, 2026, US$1 = 6.7220 yuan.

No other industry comes close: finance was second among non-private employers, at 211,164 yuan, with scientific research and technical services third at 182,064. Within larger firms, an IT professional earned about 1.8 times the all-industry professional average. The industry’s non-private figure rose 4.1% on 2024, from 238,966 yuan, which is worth knowing if your project runs into next year.

Which row to use depends on the job. For a developer doing hands-on engineering, start with the first row. For a sense of the whole industry, including managers and support staff, use the second. The regional rows and Shenzhen show how far place moves pay across all industries, since the bureau publishes no IT wage by region.

How these figures were built

• What “average wage” means. The bureau’s figure is all the pay an employer gives its staff in the year, in cash or in kind, divided by the average headcount. It is gross pay before tax and includes the income tax, social insurance and housing fund contributions the employer withholds from the employee’s pay.
• “Larger firms” and “non-private”. Larger firms is our name for what the bureau calls above-scale enterprises (规模以上企业): companies over a size threshold in 16 industry groups. Non-private employers are urban employers with five or more staff, other than private firms: domestic units including government bodies and public institutions, and companies invested from Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan or abroad.
• The 248-day divisor. 248 is the statutory count of working days: 365, minus 104 rest days, minus 13 public holidays. The human resources ministry set it from January 1, 2025 (人社部发〔2025〕2号).
• Employee figures only. The bureau surveys employers and leaves out sole traders and freelancers, so no official series measures what freelance developers charge.
• What we left out. No vendor rate card, job advert or self-reported salary survey is used. None of them is an official figure with a stated method.

It’s also why salary figures for China disagree so widely. A job advert shows what one employer offers for one opening. Self-reported surveys collect what people who chose to answer say they earn, and often cover base pay only. The bureau’s figure is what employers actually paid, averaged over everyone in the series, with the method and the release date printed beside it. Use it as the baseline.

The two IT rows measure different people. The first counts only professional and technical staff, at larger firms. The second counts everyone at a non-private employer in the industry, from managers to support staff, at firms of every size above five people. The bureau doesn’t split either one by seniority or by programming language.

It does publish a managers’ series. Middle and senior managers at larger IT firms earned 472,496 yuan in 2025, the highest IT figure in the release. That’s a management wage, not a senior engineer’s, but if your lead developer will also run a team, it tells you where the ceiling sits.

City rows for Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou and Chengdu are left out. For Beijing and Shanghai we found only the combined average for all employers that each city uses to set social insurance limits, with no industry rows. Hangzhou’s and Chengdu’s official sites didn’t load for us on the day, so their bulletins couldn’t be read at the source.

From a salary to a project price

If you skipped the method, keep one thing from it: every figure above is what an employee earns.

That 16,665 yuan is what the same 15 days would cost in an employee’s wages, and nothing more. A freelancer’s bid has to carry more than that.

They aren’t paid between projects, so the days they bill pay for the days they don’t. They buy their own laptop and test hardware, and replace them when they wear out. They pay their own social insurance as a flexible worker, with no employer to share it. And there’s income tax on what you pay them, as labor remuneration: when a payer in China pays, it withholds the tax, and when nobody does, the freelancer usually declares the income themselves.

None of those costs comes with an official figure, so this page doesn’t add a markup. The bid on your brief is the price, and the example is a floor to read it against.

To compare a real bid, ask how many days each milestone takes, and divide the milestone price by those days. For IT work, a day price below 1,111 yuan (about $165) is below what an employee earns per working day, and it’s worth asking why.

If you want someone for a month rather than a feature, use the month column instead. The IT professional series comes to 22,959 yuan a month, about $3,415, and a monthly bid has the same costs to carry on top. A note on the divisor: the freelancer page uses the ministry’s day-wage conversion, 21.75 paid days a month, which puts the same IT wage at 1,056 yuan a day. Dividing by 248 shows the pay per day actually worked, which is the fairer match for days billed.

For firmware tied to a product made in China, the guide to hardware prototyping in Shenzhen covers the work around the code.

What moves the price

• City. The East region paid 149,902 yuan a year across all industries in 2025 and the West 114,989. For professional and technical staff at larger firms the gap is wider: 178,144 yuan in the East against 127,950 in the West. Shenzhen sits at 191,367, though that figure covers every industry, not just software.
• Stack and domain. Embedded, mobile, back end and data work price differently, and no official series splits them, so this page prints no figure by stack. Ask each bidder which part of your stack they have shipped before, and weigh the bid against that answer.
• English for daily work. Fewer developers write specs and run stand-ups in English every day, and the ones who do charge for it. A short written status update in English, as part of a paid trial, is a better test than a line on a profile.
• Overlap hours. China runs on UTC+8 all year. A 9 a.m. call in New York lands at 9 or 10 p.m. in Beijing, while a 9 a.m. call in Berlin lands mid-afternoon. Decide the overlap before you post the job. It changes who can bid. Working across time zones covers handovers that avoid late calls.
• Scope clarity. A scope a developer can estimate gets a tighter bid. How to write a brief freelancers can bid on shows the structure, and the chapter on vetting shows how to test the estimate with a paid trial.

If you employ instead

An employee costs more than the wage, because the employer adds social insurance and housing fund contributions on top. Each city sets the rates and the base they’re charged on. In Shanghai, the 2026 contribution base runs from 7,546 to 37,731 yuan a month, from July 1, 2026, which is 60% and 300% of the city’s 2025 average wage across all employers, 12,577 yuan a month. A developer on the IT professional average, 22,959 a month, sits inside that range. Contractor or employee in China explains when a developer stops being a contractor in Chinese law.

Edition history

Edition 1, October 18, 2026. The next edition follows the bureau’s release of 2026 wages; the 2025 figures came out on May 15, 2026.

Developers bid on posted jobs in Engineering and Data and AI. For other roles, see what freelancers in China cost, and for documents, Chinese translation rates. The overview of hiring a freelancer in China covers the rest. Post the job, and read the bids against this table. Start a brief.