This is what JPMorgan pays technologists outside New York City

JPMorgan is moving people out of New York City. Instead of Park Avenue, the bank wants to shunt some of its people to lower cost locations like Plano, Texas, or Columbus, Ohio.

It's a move that Bloomberg says could affect primarily 'non-client facinng workers' in the back office, but which might hit some junior bankers in the front office too.

If you work in technology for JPMorgan, this isn't going to come as new news. JPMorgan spent 2018 creating a new Regional Operations and Technology' headquarters in Plano and finished moving 6,500 existing staff there earlier this year. The Dallas Morning News reported that the bank ultimately expects to employ 11,000 people in the city and is in the process of building a new tower to house the next 4,000 people. If you work for JPMorgan in New York now, there's a fair chance you'll work in Plano in future - especially if you work in tech.

JPMorgan didn't respond to a request to comment for this article but the chart below helps explain Plano's appeal, along with other low cost locations. They're, well...low cost.

Salaries in the chart are based on averages taken from the H1B Visa database over the past year. As ever, they're not totally representative and they only represent pay for 'software engineers' hired by JPM on HIB visas, but they do underscore the salary savings that can be made by moving people out of NYC. Pay for the average (non-VP level) software engineer at JPMorgan in New York is $141k according to H1B data; in Plano it's just $116k.

Interestingly, some of JPMorgan's highest paid software developers aren't in New York but in Seattle, where the bank has been hiring cloud security developers for its dedicated cloud engineering hub. Salaries are also pretty generous at Redwood City, California, where the bank has another technology hub after buying fintech start-up WePay in 2017 to facilitate payments to small business customers. 

As we noted earlier this month, JPMorgan is also paying some generous salaries in San Mateo California as it builds out an AI team. These aren't included in the chart below, which tracks pay for standard software developer roles alone.

Photo by Manuel Velasquez on Unsplash

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