Solutions Architect salary
What a solutions architect actually earns, from 1,578 live job postings blended with the official US OEWS (Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics) wage anchor. Pick a market for its median and range, then read the seniority split, the trend, and the country comparison below. Updated 2026-09-06.
Switch the market above to see solutions architect pay in the 7 countries our sources cover, each with its own cost of living. The trend, seniority, and state detail below are United States data, where the official record runs deepest.
What the number means
Solutions architect is the senior ceiling of the software track that you reach without leaving engineering for management. The blended US median is about 146,000 dollars, the highest of the tech roles on this board, with a middle half from 118,000 to 178,000 and a trend of 23 percent since 2019. The OEWS anchor of 108,970 sits well below the posted band because the official category is broad and the advertised roles skew senior and well-funded. Unemployment is 3.3 percent, in line with software. What the pay buys is breadth plus translation: designing systems across services one person will never build, and selling that design to a room that cannot read a stack trace. For a software engineer, it is the cleanest senior move on our graph, because the cloud fluency is already there; the gap is stakeholder communication, which is exactly what strong engineers most often lack.
Open solutions architect roles
Live openings tagged to this occupation, from company career pages and remote boards. Apply at the source.
Senior Partner Solutions Architect at ElasticGermanyTodayApply
Senior Machine Learning Solutions Architect at EmpowerUnited States · Remote$138k–$200kTodayApply
Salesforce Solution Architect, Field Service at NeuraFlashCanada · RemoteTodayApply
(Senior) SAP ABAP Developer / Architect – Data Management & ILM (m/w/d) at Natuvion GmbHRemote job1d agoApply
Software Architect at NiceGermany1d agoApply
AI Architect- Senior Manager at Unity AdvisoryLondon, Mayfair1d agoApply
By seniority
Posted-median pay by seniority signal in the title, from our corpus. Noisy at the edges where sample sizes are small.
By country
- United States$128,818$162,988$209,429
- Canada$93,852$112,803$146,372
- United Kingdom$78,517$104,031$136,436
- Australia$125,431$144,348$174,886
- Spain$93,439$105,119$128,478
- Netherlands$77,788$93,030$112,126
- India$15,398$20,878$30,013
Switzerland · official wage bands
median CHF 9'949/month
Swiss postings do not state pay, so these are not posted salaries: they are the federal wage survey (Lohnstrukturerhebung 2024) for the ISCO group 25 Spezialisten in der Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologie: standardized gross monthly, full-time, 13th salary included pro rata. The band covers the whole occupation group, which is coarser than this occupation alone.
Annual ≈ CHF 119'388 at the median. Source: Bundesamt für Statistik, LSE 2024.
Top-paying US states
OEWS median by state, highest first.
- California$170,160
- New York$161,627
- Maryland$141,540
- Virginia$132,810
- Washington$131,800
- Colorado$119,560
Roles that pay more, that these skills already reach
Median pay from each destination’s own postings, with the readiness a solutions architect profile already covers.
- 600 open software engineer roles$185,617 median · +$22,629 · 24% readiness
- 294 open machine learning engineer roles$172,210 median · +$9,222 · 27% readiness
Every measured move out of this role, ranked by readiness: alternative careers for a solutions architect.
Is your offer fair?
Run a specific number through FairElephant, which weighs it against this data, your location, and remote market rates.
Move into or out of solutions architect
- software engineer → solutions architectmeasured route
Related salaries
- Software Engineer salary$185,617 median
- Data Engineer salary$147,787 median
- Data Scientist salary$152,167 median
Quick answers
How much do solutions architects make?
The blended US median is about 146,000 dollars, the highest of the tech roles on our board, with a typical range of 118,000 to 178,000.
Is solutions architect a good career move from software engineering?
It is the cleanest senior step: cloud and implementation skills transfer directly, and the gap is stakeholder communication. See the software-engineer-to-solutions-architect route.
Why is the solutions architect salary above the OEWS figure?
The official OEWS category is broad and the advertised roles skew senior and well-funded, so the posted band runs above the 108,970 anchor.
Method: bands are the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles of live US postings with stated pay, shrunk toward the official OEWS anchor by sample size (the “blended” figure). Trend is the OEWS annual median for SOC (Standard Occupational Classification) code 15-1299. Unemployment is the 2025 BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics) CPS (Current Population Survey) annual-average rate for “Software developers.” Live corpus 1,578 observations, 2026-09-06. Definitions in the glossary.