Which Programming Languages Earn the Highest Salaries? 2022 Stack Overflow Insights

The 2022 Stack Overflow Developer Survey reveals that less‑used programming languages and skills command the highest salaries. Clojure, a Lisp dialect often used for big‑data processing, tops the list with an average salary of $106,644.

Clojure’s Lisp heritage also makes it popular in artificial‑intelligence programming, where it ranks fourth with an average salary of $95,526 (≈ £78,249).

Erlang, historically employed by WhatsApp for large‑scale systems, still sees strong compensation; its median annual salary reaches $103,000 (≈ £84,361), about $20,000 higher than in 2021 despite a slight dip in popularity.

Other high‑paying languages include F#, Ruby, Elixir, Scala and Perl, each averaging above $90,000 (≈ £73,734).

Overall developer salaries rose in 2022, with the top‑paying languages remaining stable. COBOL developers experienced the greatest percentage increase, while the average software developer salary grew to $75,592, up by more than $20,000 from the previous year.

JavaScript continues to be the most widely used language for the tenth consecutive year, essential for front‑end development alongside HTML/CSS and Python as common entry‑level choices. However, JavaScript and HTML/CSS offer the lowest salaries among the surveyed languages, at $65,580 and $63,984 respectively, whereas Python developers earn an average of $71,105.

The premium salaries for niche languages are explained by market scarcity: only 1‑3% of developers use these high‑paying languages, forcing companies to offer higher compensation to attract the limited talent pool.

In summary, developers specializing in less common languages enjoy significantly higher earnings, while the most popular front‑end technologies remain the lowest‑paid options.