Salary and contract rate survey 2026
Virtually every salary survey in the IT market includes architecture, and they all share the same problem. They rely on someone’s job title matching the job they actually do, and anyone who has hired an architect will know how often it does not.
This survey goes a step further. Rather than simply matching job titles to salaries, it matches job titles to the deliverables people actually produce, to build a far more accurate picture of the architecture job family. For example, if you are an Enterprise Architect but your core deliverables are landing zone design, non-functional requirements and high-level designs, you are more likely to be classified as a Cloud or Infrastructure Architect. That is not a comment on your title, it is simply what the work says.
An accurate picture matters whether you are hiring an architect or applying to be one. Our own research in July 2026 found that only 27% of architecture roles accurately matched their job description.
The survey takes around 10–12 minutes. Your answers are anonymous: we do not ask for your name or email. At the end, you can ask for a copy of the full results.
