Entry Level DevOps Engineer Salary: $91,520 at Labor Department Level I, Climbing to $163,000 at Level IV

The entry level DevOps engineer salary on certified H-1B filings was a median $91,520 as of June 30, 2026, across 343 filings decided since July 2025 at the Labor Department’s “beginning level” tier. Site reliability titles outside tech vendors sit at $92,955; DevOps at Level IV reaches $163,000. These are H-1B offers, not all DevOps pay.

Source: our analysis of DOL OFLC LCA disclosure data. Each rung is a median offered wage. Hover for the range and count. On a phone this chart scrolls sideways. SRE Level I sits above Level II because tech vendors file much of it: see the next table.

Latest change: DevOps Level I filings fell 44% in the first cap season under wage-weighted H-1B selection, from 254 in April to June 2025 to 141 in April to June 2026.

What the Labor Department means by entry level

BLS has no DevOps occupation: its 2018 title file has no such entry, and BLS does not publish pay by experience. H-1B Labor Condition Applications fill both gaps. Each one lists the employer’s own JOB_TITLE, the offered wage and one of four prevailing wage levels. We downloaded every filing from FY2022 to the third quarter of FY2026, the latest the Labor Department had posted when we checked on November 2, 2026.

The level describes the job as the employer filed it, not a person’s years of experience. Level II is for “qualified employees who have attained, either through education or experience, a good understanding of the occupation,” Level III for “experienced employees,” and Level IV for “competent employees who have sufficient experience in the occupation to plan and conduct work requiring judgment.” Among DevOps filings, 13% are Level I and 54% are Level II, so Level II, not Level I, is the most common DevOps filing.

Level I offers across DevOps, SRE and platform titles

Certified full-time H-1B filings decided July 1, 2025 to June 30, 2026. Platform has only 28 Level I filings, so treat its percentiles as rough. Filings titled exactly “DevOps Engineer” give nearly the same answer: $91,406 on 212 Level I filings.

The $122,000 SRE figure overstates what a typical entry level reliability job offers. TikTok/ByteDance (27 filings, $170,000 median) and Google (10 filings, $140,500) drive it. Outside tech vendors the SRE Level I median is $92,955 on 75 filings, close to DevOps at $91,520. Who hires matters more than the title:

Consulting and staffing firms filed 82% of DevOps Level I jobs, and their median of $90,900 is effectively the legal floor. An H-1B employer must pay at least the higher of the prevailing wage or its actual wage for similar workers. Across all three titles, 44% of Level I offers equal the prevailing wage on the same filing and 61% are within 5% of it. The median offer is 1.00 times the prevailing wage at consulting firms, 1.08 times at end customers and 1.28 times at tech vendors. Holding state and title constant, consulting Level I offers are 10.7% below end customers. No employer dominates: the largest DevOps Level I filers, Brillius Technologies, Pristen IT Systems and Magtech Consulting And Solutions Development, filed 6, 6 and 5.

The climb from Level I to Level IV

A DevOps job filed at Level IV has a median 1.78 times one filed at Level I. Each rung adds about $21,403 to $25,077: $21,403 to Level II, $25,077 to Level III and $25,000 to Level IV. By Level IV the three titles converge, at $163,000, $163,550 and $165,000. These are cross-sections of different filings, not raises one person gets by staying put.

Why title words are a poor guide to entry level

Only 48 of 4,402 filings carry an entry-sounding title such as Junior, Associate or “Engineer I”, led by “ASSOCIATE, SRE III” (8), “SITE RELIABILITY ENGINEER I” (6), “JUNIOR DEVOPS ENGINEER” (4), “DEVOPS ENGINEER I” (4), and 17 of those are filed at Level I. Their median is $112,362, above the Level I figure, and some are corporate ranks rather than career stages, such as “ASSOCIATE, SRE III”. The reverse also happens: 27 Level I filings have Senior, Lead, Principal or Staff in the title, at a $130,000 median. That is why this page uses the wage level, not the title, to define entry level. 41% of Level I filings are marked as new employment and 22% as a change of employer, and a change of employer is not a first job.

What changed: the first cap season under weighted selection

DevOps Level I filings fell 44% between April to June 2025 and April to June 2026, from 254 to 141, as the Level I share of DevOps filings dropped from 21.7% to 14.5%. Consulting filings accounted for most of it, 218 to 113. The median Level I offer rose 7.4%, from $84,640 to $90,896, while the median prevailing wage on those filings rose 4.7%. As a control, Level I filings for all software developers (15-1252) fell 30%, so DevOps fell harder than the field.

Two federal actions apply and the filings cannot separate them. Proclamation 10973 requires a $100,000 payment for certain new H-1B petitions, and the DHS rule enters Level IV registrations in the lottery four times and Level I registrations once; the rule’s own analysis estimates “a 48 percent drop in selections for wage level I beneficiaries.” Our H-1B statistics report covers the program. Because filings also include extensions and job changes, this is not a count of new entry level hires.

DevOps Level I filings per decision quarter, with the median offer above each bar. Compare the same quarter across years: April to June carries the cap season every year.

*FY2026 covers October 2025 to June 2026. Over the rolling 12 months to June 2026 the DevOps Level I median rose 6.4%, against 485 filings the year before.

Entry level pay by state

We pooled 24 months (July 2024 to June 2026) across all three titles to get usable counts, which leaves 20 states with at least 10 Level I filings. California tops the map at $135,200, though 33% of its filings come from tech vendors, and without them the median is $112,000. Missouri is lowest at $76,272. Texas has by far the most, 279 filings at $86,000. The prevailing wage column is the median legal floor on those filings, which shows how much of each state’s figure the floor sets.

Tile position approximates geography. Worksite is the first location on the filing. Hover a tile for the count.

DevOps engineer vs cloud engineer salary

Cloud engineers lead on the median, $127,200 against $115,000, but level by level the two jobs pay almost the same. A regression gives cloud engineers +6.6% with no controls and +0.5% at the same wage level, an interval that includes zero. Adding state and employer type turns it to -1.8%. The gap comes from the mix: 39% of cloud engineer filings are Level III or IV against 26% for DevOps, and consulting firms filed 71% of DevOps jobs against 48% of cloud engineer jobs. Coursera, citing Glassdoor, shows total pay medians of $145,000 for DevOps and $152,000 for cloud engineers.

The SRE premium mostly belongs to the employer

One career site says SREs earn “15-25% more than DevOps engineers at equivalent levels.” On raw filings the difference is 22%, inside that range, but that is without matching levels. At the same wage level it is 13%. Adding state and employer type leaves 2.2%, and inside one employer at the same level and state SRE titles come out -3.0%. Tech vendors filed 37% of SRE jobs and 8% of DevOps jobs, and that is most of the difference.

How this compares with BLS and PayScale

Employers filed 76% of DevOps jobs as software developers (15-1252), 7% as systems administrators (15-1244) and only 0.5% as network architects (15-1241), the code behind our network engineer salary report. So the BLS 10th percentile for software developers, $82,460, is the closest public benchmark, and the DevOps Level I median of $91,520 sits $9,060 above it. PayScale’s entry level DevOps page shows an $81,494 average from 404 salary profiles, with a $59,000 to $109,000 range, and says it was last updated February 1, 2025. PayScale’s profiles are not limited to visa jobs, so that $59,000 low end is not bound by the prevailing wage, whose median on DevOps Level I filings here is $90,896.

What this means for MSPs

Level I is a training hire, by definition. The guidance says these workers “work under close supervision.” A $90,900 consulting-rate hire costs about $130,791 a year once you apply BLS’s figure that wages are 69.5% of employer costs in professional and business services, before the senior engineer’s time spent supervising.

Build or buy. GSA ceiling rates for DevOps labor categories with two years of required experience or less have a median of $119.74 an hour across 154 rates, against $154.09 for all DevOps categories. At the junior rate, a Level I hire breaks even at about 1,092 hours a year (annual cost divided by that rate), or 21 a week, ignoring supervision time. If you cannot fill that with supervised work, buy it. These are federal ceiling rates, not commercial quotes, so test the math with your own vendor’s rate. Our IT hourly rates report has other roles.

Budget the next rung before you hire the first. A filing one level up carries a median $21,403 higher. At Level II, end customers offer $127,430 against $112,424 at consulting firms, so a junior you train into Level II work is priced $15,006 higher by the clients who see their work.

There is no MSP benchmark in this data. NAICS 541513, computer facilities management, had only 7 filings across these three titles in 12 months.

Frequently asked questions

What is the entry level DevOps engineer salary?

On certified H-1B filings, the median offer at the Labor Department’s entry tier, Level I, was $91,520 from July 2025 to June 2026, across 343 filings. The middle half ran from $87,755 to $103,210. This is base wage on H-1B filings only, not the pay of all junior DevOps staff.

How much does a DevOps engineer make after moving up from entry level?

Medians step up from $91,520 at Level I to $112,923 at Level II, $138,000 at Level III and $163,000 at Level IV. Level IV is 1.78 times Level I. These compare different filings, not one person’s career.

What does Level I mean on a Labor Condition Application?

The Labor Department’s guidance says Level I wage rates are for ‘beginning level employees who have only a basic understanding of the occupation’, who ‘perform routine tasks that require limited, if any, exercise of judgment’ and ‘work under close supervision’. The employer picks the level for the job on its filing.

DevOps engineer vs cloud engineer salary: which pays more?

Cloud engineers on the median, $127,200 against $115,000, but at the same wage level there is effectively no gap: $92,394 vs $91,520 at Level I and $112,923 vs $112,923 at Level II. A regression holding level constant gives cloud engineers +0.5%, with an interval that includes zero.

Do site reliability engineers earn more than DevOps engineers?

On raw medians yes, $146,952 against $115,000, but that reflects who hires them. Comparing inside one employer at the same level and state, SRE titles came out -3.0%. At Level I outside tech vendors, SRE offers ($92,955) are about the same as DevOps offers.

Are entry level DevOps jobs disappearing?

H-1B Level I DevOps filings fell 44% in the first cap season under wage-weighted selection, 254 in April to June 2025 to 141 in April to June 2026. That covers visa filings only, so it does not measure entry level hiring in general.

Methodology

References

1. U.S. Department of Labor, OFLC Performance Data: LCA Disclosure Data FY2022 to FY2026 Q3, with record layout. Accessed November 2026.
2. U.S. Department of Labor, Prevailing Wage Determination Policy Guidance (revised November 2009). Accessed November 2026.
3. U.S. Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division, Fact Sheet 62G: Must an H-1B employer pay a certain wage rate? Accessed November 2026.
4. Proclamation 10973, Restriction on Entry of Certain Nonimmigrant Workers, 90 FR 46027. Accessed November 2026.
5. DHS, Weighted Selection Process final rule, 90 FR 60864. Accessed November 2026.
6. DOL, Improving Wage Protections, proposed rule, 91 FR 15454. Accessed November 2026.
7. USCIS, FY 2027 H-1B initial registration selection process completed and USCIS reaches fiscal year 2027 H-1B cap. Accessed November 2026.
8. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, OEWS May 2025 national estimates. Accessed November 2026.
9. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, June 2026, Table 6. Accessed November 2026.
10. U.S. General Services Administration, CALC+ labor rates (API: api.gsa.gov/acquisition/calc/v3). Accessed November 2026.
11. PayScale, Average Entry-Level DevOps Engineer Salary. Accessed November 2026.
12. Coursera, DevOps Engineer vs Cloud Engineer (citing Glassdoor, September 2026). Accessed November 2026.
13. Hakia, DevOps vs SRE in 2026. Accessed November 2026.