America's Highest Paying Companies

Microsoft has about 131,000 full-time employees around the world. Of them, the 78,000 who work in the United States earn an average of $118,000 a year. This relatively high pay is mostly attributable to software engineers and IT managers as well as the various program and account managers needed to keep such a large company running smoothly at all levels.

Consumer-facing jobs come with a unique set of stressors and challenges. At Apple, these jobs also pay one of the lowest salaries. Apple’s “Geniuses,” or floor staffers at Apple stores, make on average $45,440 a year. The engineers who work behind the scenes to develop Apple’s software and hardware have much higher salaries, often more than $140,000. Full-time workers across the company as a whole earn an average of $121,000 a year.

As an employment-oriented social media platform, LinkedIn has several competitors and must set itself apart however it can. LinkedIn has positions such as site reliability engineers, product marketing managers, and user experience designers — all essential for the platform’s success — that earn average salaries of well over $100,000 a year.

VMware is a software company that aims to help businesses better launch and maintain their online presence utilizing cloud computing technology. This type of business requires a large team of software developers — one of the most in demand and highly compensated career fields in America. Most of these workers nationwide make at least $100,000 a year, and VMware, which is located in one of the most expensive parts of the country to live, must compensate its developers even more to account for the high cost of living.

Among all of the tech companies with well-compensated employees, NVIDIA stands out. The company, which creates interactive graphics cards for video games, cars, artificial intelligence and more, pays its salaried employees and average of $137,000 a year — $11,000 more than the next highest paying company. Like most of the other companies on this list, it employs many software engineers as well as hardware designers and system architects. These high-paying, high-tech career fields all typically pay well above $100,000 per year, and NVIDIA pays well more.