How much TikTok pays employees, according to salary data

Huileng Tan

June 24, 2022 10:23 AM

How much TikTok pays employees, according to salary data

TikTok has been hiring aggressively in the US.
Insider combed through public data to get a snapshot of how much TikTok employees in the US make.
TikTok and owner ByteDance has offered base salaries between $30 an hour and $400,000 a year.

TikTok is hiring aggressively in the US where competition from big-tech rivals is heating up.The app's user base exploded last year, passing one billion monthly active users globally, according to the company. And the growth led competitors like Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat to roll out copycat features.

The company has been staffing up to stay ahead of the competition and meet growing demand. It currently has more than 2,000 US job openings listed on its website.

While current and former TikTok staffers have described the workplace culture ashigh pressure, with roles that can demandworking outside of normal business hours, the company continues to attract applicants in cities across the US.

Insider updated its analysis of how much TikTok employees make in the US, based on more than a hundred new work-visa applications.

The public data, released by the US Department of Labor's Office of Foreign Labor Certification, shows how much TikTok and ByteDance offered to pay employees who it wanted to hire in the US through work visas. The data include base salaries only, not forms of compensation such as stock options or cash bonuses.

It shows, for example, that TikTok pays $100,000 per year or more for certain content-operations roles, and that ByteDance has offered as much as $200,000 per year for software engineers for its AR-effect platform. Overall, TikTok and ByteDance offered certain staffers between October 2020 and March 2022 base salaries ranging from $30 an hour to $400,000 per year for a variety of different roles, according to the data.

Our full analysis breaks down salaries for jobs including product and engineering, data and research, and monetization and partnership-focused roles.

Huileng Tan