Software Developers and the SOC 15-1252 Caveat
No occupation code in LCA data needs a warning label more than 15-1252, Software Developers. It is consistently among the largest codes in the disclosure files, and on its face it looks like the perfect category for studying developer pay. The problem is that the category's boundaries moved. When the Standard Occupational Classification system was revised in its 2018 edition, the older structure that separated Software Developers, Applications (15-1132), Software Developers, Systems Software (15-1133) and Computer Programmers (15-1131) was reorganised. In the current structure, 15-1252 covers Software Developers, 15-1251 covers Computer Programmers, and neighbouring codes cover quality assurance analysts, testers and web developers.
In practice, filings did not remap cleanly. Employers and law firms translating internal titles into SOC codes made different choices during and after the transition, and many roles that would once have been filed as programmers or applications developers were filed under 15-1252. The result is that 15-1252 functions as a catch-all for a broad family of software-building roles: product engineers, programmers, full-stack developers, and in some firms roles close to testing or platform work. Its filing count is therefore larger, and its wage distribution wider, than a strict reading of the title 'Software Developers' would suggest.
This site handles the problem by flagging rather than hiding it. The 15-1252 page carries a dedicated caveat section, this guide explains the reclassification, and the methodology names the issue explicitly. We do not attempt to reassign filings to other codes, because the disclosure file records the code the employer chose and any reassignment by us would substitute our guesses for the filer's attestation. What we can do — and do — is publish the neighbouring codes' pages alongside it, so readers can compare 15-1252 with Computer Programmers and the other computer occupations and see how much of a conclusion survives the comparison.
The practical stakes are real. A researcher who treats 15-1252 as a pure census of senior software developers will understate typical senior developer pay, because the code includes many junior and programmer-type filings. A researcher who treats it as including all software work will overstate its coverage, because some employers file developers under engineering, data or analyst codes. Both errors appear regularly in commentary built on this data. The safer statement is the narrower one: 15-1252 is the largest single bucket of developer-type filings, with a median that describes that bucket as filed.
Two habits protect readers. First, always read the 15-1252 distribution — its 25th and 75th percentiles — rather than its median alone, because a catch-all category has a characteristically wide middle. Second, triangulate: check the employer page for the firm in question to see which codes it actually files developers under, since a firm's own mapping habit matters more for interpreting its filings than the national pattern. This site's employer pages list each firm's top SOC codes with counts precisely so that check takes seconds.
How These Figures Were Computed
Every figure on this page was computed by our script directly from the U.S. Department of Labor OFLC LCA disclosure files for FY2024 Q4 and FY2025 Q1–Q4, retrieved in October 2026. We kept only cases whose CASE_STATUS is exactly “Certified” — denied, withdrawn and certified-withdrawn cases are excluded. Headline medians use filings whose wage unit is a year, because annual salaries compare cleanly; hourly, weekly and monthly filings are counted in case totals but are not converted into the headline median, and our methodology page explains that choice in full. Wages below $15,080 a year (the annualized federal minimum wage at $7.25 an hour) or above $1,000,000 a year are excluded from medians as likely data-entry placeholders, and the number excluded is reported in the manifest that accompanies this site. Medians are shown alongside means because a handful of very large offers can drag a mean far above what a typical filing actually offered.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where does the data behind this guide come from?
All figures referenced in this guide come from the U.S. Department of Labor OFLC LCA disclosure files for FY2024 Q4 and FY2025 Q1–Q4, retrieved in October 2026, filtered to 662,198 cases with a status of exactly Certified. The methodology page documents the full cleaning process.