Build the websites and web apps people actually use. The tech job with the shortest distance between learning something and being paid for it.
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Pay, the path, pros and cons and the facts on one printable page. Counsellors: send it to a student from your own email in one click.
The median pay is about $92,650 a year. Across everyone in the job it runs from about $48,100 at the lower end to about $162,290 at the upper end. The source is listed under Sources at the end of this page.
Up to 4 years after high school, on the usual route.
$200 to $48,000 all in for tuition, fees, exams and kit. Living costs are not counted.
No. There is no license to hold, though many employers still ask for training or a certificate.
Moderate demand nationally, from government outlook data. Demand varies by region, so check your area.
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What you earn and what it costs to get there.
Median
$92,650
Bottom tenth
$48,100
Top tenth
$162,290
The national median is $92,650 a year. The bottom tenth earn $48,100 or less and the top tenth $162,290 or more (2025 federal wage survey). This is the survey's figure for web developers specifically, a separate category from software developers, whose median is $135,980.
$48,100 to $64,230
What the bottom tenth to bottom quarter of web developers earn, 2025
Getting hired without experience is the real barrier in this field, not the coding. Once you have experience on a team, the market opens up.
$130,440 a year
The median in Washington state, the highest of any state
Virginia is close behind at $128,380 and California at $119,570. The lowest is Arkansas, at $50,550. State medians from the 2025 federal wage survey, before any stock.
Roughly, all in
$200 to $48,000
Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel
This is the one technology path where the no-cost route genuinely competes: the languages, the documentation and most learning material cost nothing, so the low end is a couple of hundred dollars for a paid course, a domain and hosting while you build projects. The cheap door is harder to walk through than it reads, because you have to finish real work and get past screening with no credential. The high end is a four year computer science degree at roughly $12,000 a year at an in state public university, or about $4,150 a year for a two year community college associate degree. An online competency based degree at Western Governors University runs about $4,325 per six month term, tuition plus its resource fee. Coding bootcamps charge five figures with a mixed record.
File the FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) before paying for anything. This is the one tech path where a no-cost self-taught route genuinely competes with a paid one, so borrowing heavily is rarely the right call.
Salary at a company
Steady, with health insurance and often a retirement match. The default and the easiest to plan a life around.
Contract and agency work
Higher hourly rates, no benefits, and gaps between contracts you have to save for.
Freelance
Small business websites and maintenance. Easy to start, hard to charge properly, and half the job is chasing invoices.
Location pay bands
Remote jobs increasingly pay by where you live. Same work, different number.
The exact path from high school to qualified.
No license, no exam and no required degree. What replaces all of that is a set of things you have built that a stranger can open.
High school diploma
Grade 12
Start now. HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) in a weekend, then JavaScript. You need a laptop and nothing else.
Build real things
6 to 18 months
Not tutorials. Something with a purpose that you put on the internet where people can use it and break it.
Decide on a degree
0 to 4 years
In the O*NET (Occupational Information Network) survey, 46% of people in this job said a bachelor's degree is required, 17% an associate degree and 17% a certificate. A degree opens doors at big employers and is optional everywhere else.
Get the first job
3 to 12 months of applying
Junior developer, agency, internship or a registered tech apprenticeship. Expect a technical interview where you write code in front of someone.
Specialize
Year 2 onward
Front end, back end, full stack, performance, accessibility or security. Depth is what moves your pay after year three.
Computer science
If your school offers it, take it. If not, that changes nothing about your chances.
Math
Less than people assume for web work, but logic and algebra make everything easier.
English
You will write documentation, commit messages and explanations for non-technical people every single day.
Art or design
Knowing why a layout feels wrong makes a front end developer much more valuable.
Business
Most web work exists to make a business money. Understanding that gets you into better rooms.
There is no state license, no board and no exam. Anyone can take the title, which is why hiring runs on portfolios and technical interviews instead of credentials. The closest thing to an official rulebook is the World Wide Web Consortium, the body that publishes the web standards browsers implement, including the accessibility guidelines that government and large-company contracts require you to meet. Knowing those guidelines is a genuine professional edge and costs nothing to learn.
On your own, at no cost
A common route into this job. No-cost curricula, documentation and open source projects you can read.
Community college
Two-year web development and computer science associate degrees, cheap, and they transfer.
Four-year computer science
The route large employers and visa-sponsoring companies prefer, and the best option if you might move into other software work.
Registered apprenticeships
Technology apprenticeships registered with the federal apprenticeship office pay you while you learn. Rarer than in the trades, but they exist.
Things you don't need, but that help.
React and TypeScript
The federal occupation profile lists both as in-demand skills, alongside Vue.js and Git. Most front end job listings ask for them by name.
Back end and databases
Being able to build the server side as well as the screen roughly doubles the jobs you can apply for.
Cloud platforms
Deploying and running what you build on AWS (Amazon Web Services) or a similar platform is now expected, not a bonus.
Accessibility
Building sites that work for blind and disabled users is legally required on a lot of contracts and is a rare specialty.
Three projects a stranger can open
Deployed, working, with a link. In this field it often counts for more than a certificate.
Git and public code
Version control is how every team works, and public repositories let employers read how you think.
Writing clearly
The developers who can explain a trade-off in plain English end up leading teams.
Patience for debugging
Much of the job is finding out why something that worked yesterday does not work now.
Small businesses, restaurants, dentists and nonprofits all need websites and almost none of them can hire a developer full time. It is the easiest freelance work to start, because the first client is usually someone you already know, and the hardest to do well, because you are also the salesperson, the project manager and the support desk. A lot of developers use it to earn while they learn, then move to a salaried job for the stability, and keep two or three clients on a maintenance retainer.
Day to day, pros and cons, where you'd work.
A short stand-up call in the morning where everyone says what they are working on. Then long blocks of writing and reading code, broken up by reviewing someone else's changes and being asked questions in chat. Something breaks in the afternoon and you spend two hours finding out it was a stray character in a configuration file. You ship, you write the notes, you close the ticket. Most of this happens from home.
The good
The hard parts
Things people don't tell you.
About 87,400 people were employed as web developers in the United States in 2025. O*NET (Occupational Information Network), the federal career database, rates growth from 2025 to 2035 as average (3% to 4%), with about 5,300 openings a year. Plenty of people who build websites are counted under other job titles, which is why the number looks smaller than the industry feels.
Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the web, founded the World Wide Web Consortium in 1994 to set its standards. It now has more than 330 member organizations, and anyone can read its specifications at no cost.
Every list is built from the same numbers shown above, so you can see where this career sits next to the others.
Software first, then the rest of the field. See every career in tech.
Last checked October 2026. Pay figures are typical full-time annual amounts in United States dollars, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics wage data and published pay scales. They vary by state, employer and experience. Tuition is for in-state students at public schools unless the card says otherwise. How every figure on this site is sourced and checked.
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