IT salaries in Russia, autumn 2026: medians by grade and stack

The salary expectations question comes up at almost every screening, and it is hard to answer without a view of the market. A number borrowed from a friend, or "current pay plus thirty percent", can land below the range or well above it.

Sobes has its own slice of the market: vacancies posted in Telegram channels for the Russian market. We took the posts published since August 1, 2026 and counted the salary ranges, the skills they ask for and the work format they offer.

Where the data comes from and how we counted

The source is job posts for the Russian market from Telegram channels, published from August 1 to mid-November 2026. There are 63 thousand of them, and the text of each one is parsed into fields: grade, stack, salary range, skills, work format. A salary is stated in 21 thousand posts, which is one third. The medians below use a narrower sample: only vacancies with a range in rubles per month and a stated grade, 3,750 posts. The salary of a vacancy is the midpoint of its range. The limitations are serious. This is not hh.ru (the main job board in Russia) and not actual pay, only numbers from the posts. Not everyone publishes a range, and the higher the grade, the less often: 42% of junior posts have one, 34% of middle, 33% of senior, 25% of lead. Posts don't always say whether the amount is net or before tax. And the fields are extracted from text by a model, which gets individual posts wrong.

Ranges by grade

Thousand rubles per month, midpoint of the range.

What the table shows:

• The biggest step is from junior to middle: the median goes from 90 to 200 thousand. Between middle and senior the difference is 60 thousand.
• The ranges overlap. The upper quartile for middle (250 thousand) is almost the senior median (260 thousand), so a strong middle at one company earns as much as a typical senior at another.
• The lead median is only 15 thousand above senior, but the spread is wider: an upper quartile of 350 thousand against 315 thousand.

Demand by grade is uneven too. Senior is mentioned in 16.2 thousand posts, middle in 10.2 thousand, junior in 3.1 thousand, internships in 1.4 thousand. These channels carry roughly five times fewer junior vacancies than senior ones.

Middle by stack

Median of the range midpoint, thousand rubles per month. The samples here are small: where there are fewer than 40 vacancies, read the number as a guide accurate to within a few tens of thousands.

1C is a business software platform widely used in Russia, with its own developer job market.

Senior by stack

Two rows show how carefully small samples should be read. For Go, the middle median (300 thousand, 31 vacancies) is above the senior median (275 thousand, 58 vacancies). PHP is the reverse: 178 thousand for middle and 300 thousand for senior. That is a property of a sample of a few dozen posts, not a conclusion about the market. The most reliable rows are those with more than a hundred vacancies in both tables: QA, 1C, systems analysis and Python.

Which skills are requested

Skills are taken from the requirements of all 63 thousand posts. The number shows how many vacancies mention the skill. The table lists the 22 most common technical skills.

Three groups are left out of the table. Spoken languages: English is mentioned in about 4.1 thousand posts (recorded under both its English and its Russian name), Russian in 2.5 thousand. Work tools that aren't tied to a stack: Figma, Jira, Excel, Confluence, Postman, BPMN, each with 1 to 1.8 thousand mentions. And non-technical requirements such as CRM, SMM and iGaming: the channels post marketing, sales and support jobs alongside developer ones, and iGaming names the employer's industry.

English is still worth remembering: by number of mentions it would rank fourth, right after PostgreSQL.

For a developer the takeaway is simple. SQL and PostgreSQL, Docker, Kubernetes, Linux, CI/CD and Kafka appear in requirements more often than most programming languages. This is the shared layer that gets asked of a backend developer in any language, and of QA, analysts and DevOps.

Work format

Counting only posts that name a format, remote takes 68%, office 22%, hybrid 10%. This is most likely a property of the source, so don't carry that share of remote work over to the whole market.

How to use the numbers in an interview

When you name your expectations, lean on the range for your grade and stack, not on a single median. A working scheme: the median as the floor of the conversation, the upper quartile as the target if you have what the vacancy asks for beyond the usual.

I'm looking at 280 to 300 thousand. That's a bit above the midpoint for vacancies at my level that publish a range, and I have production experience with Kubernetes and Kafka, which you list in the requirements.

The answer works because the number is tied to the market and to the requirements of this vacancy, not to your expenses. Check at the same time whether you are both talking about the net amount. Wordings for different situations are in the post on salary expectations.

When negotiating after an offer, the same numbers help you see whether there is room to move. If the offer is below the lower quartile for your grade, asking for more is justified. If it is already at the upper quartile, it makes more sense to talk about bonuses, work format and a review in six months. More in the post on negotiating an offer and a counteroffer.

What to do next

1. Open the market analytics and look at salaries and in-demand skills for your stack: the numbers there keep updating, while this post fixes a snapshot as of mid-November.
2. Check your resume against the skill list above. If you have worked with Docker, Kafka or CI/CD and the resume doesn't say so, add it. In the resume studio you can review the text and see the market range for your profile.
3. Look at fresh posts in the job board to see which ranges are offered right now for your set of skills.
4. Write down your number and one sentence of justification, and say them out loud before the call.