Software Developers salary in Nashville, Tennessee

About 8,420 Software Developers work in the Nashville metro, and they earned a median annual wage of $127,150 in 2024. That sits roughly 8% above the Tennessee median of $117,340, a meaningful gap that reflects how much of the state's tech employment concentrates inside the metro.

Against the national median of $138,520, Nashville lands about 8% lower. The difference is real but not dramatic. Developers here give up some headline pay compared to coastal peers, and the lower cost of doing business in Nashville is not something we can quantify at this level of the data.

The spread from the bottom to the top of the earnings range is worth noting. The 10th-percentile wage was $76,690 in 2024, while the 90th percentile reached $164,980. Top earners made roughly twice what entry-level peers did, a ratio that points to significant variation by seniority and specialization within the metro. One unusual detail: the mean of $122,310 actually fell below the median of $127,150, which is the opposite of what most metros show. In most markets, a smaller group of very high earners pull the average up above the middle. Here the pattern runs the other way, suggesting that the upper end of Nashville's distribution is more compressed than you'd expect and that very high earners are less represented locally than in hubs like Austin or Atlanta.

For someone already in Tennessee, Nashville is the obvious market for this occupation. For someone weighing a move from a higher-paying metro, the national gap of around $11,000 at the median is the number to examine against living costs and other factors outside this data set.