Why tech salary data in Nigeria is so hard to find

Ask a founder in Lagos what a senior backend engineer should earn and you will usually get a pause, then a range so wide it is almost useless. Ask an engineer what they should be asking for and you get the same pause. Good Nigeria tech salary data barely exists in public, and that gap costs both sides money.

We see it in almost every search we run. So this piece explains where the data goes missing, why the numbers that do exist can mislead, and what we are building to fix part of it.

Try finding a salary for a Lagos engineering lead

Run the search yourself. Type "engineering lead salary Lagos" into Google and you will find a handful of self-reported entries on Glassdoor, a few job-board blog posts, and some figures quoted in naira from before the currency moved. Very little of it says which company, what level, or whether the number includes dollar top-ups.

Now run the same search for San Francisco or London. Levels.fyi alone will give you thousands of recent, verified data points split by company and level. Same job title, two very different amounts of information.

Why the public data is thin

The first reason is simple. Very few Nigerian tech companies publish salary bands, and very few candidates share their offers. Pay is still treated as private, and there is no local habit of posting compensation the way some US engineers do.

The second reason is structure. A Nigerian tech salary is often several things at once: a naira base, a dollar component paid separately, a contractor arrangement for someone working remotely, and sometimes equity that may never be worth anything. One headline number rarely tells you what a person actually takes home.

The third reason is timing. The naira lost a large share of its value against the dollar after the Central Bank of Nigeria unified its exchange rate windows in 2023. A salary survey from 2022 is now describing a different market. Plenty of the figures still sitting in search results are from before that change.

Finally, most salary surveys are run by job boards. Their samples lean towards junior roles and people actively applying, which is exactly the group senior hires are not drawn from. Official sources like the National Bureau of Statistics cover wages across the economy, but they are not built to answer what a staff engineer at a Series B fintech earns.

Why the data that exists is skewed

There is a smaller group of people at the top of the market who are paid close to international rates. They have worked abroad, or they work remotely for foreign companies, or they were hired out of a global firm and negotiated in dollars. When those people share their pay, they pull averages up hard.

The result is a distribution with a long tail. Most senior engineers in Lagos earn well inside local ranges, a few earn several times more, and an average across both groups describes almost nobody. We wrote more about that top end in when Nigerian executive pay matches London.

So a founder who benchmarks against an average can overpay for most hires and still lose the outliers. A candidate who benchmarks against the same average can ask for too much and stall, or too little and leave money on the table.

What founders and candidates can do now

Use ranges, not single figures. If you are setting a band, decide early whether the role is paid against the local market or the international one, because those are two different conversations. Talk to two or three people who have hired for the same role in the last six months. Their numbers are more useful than any survey older than a year.

For candidates, write down your whole package, not just the base. A lower naira base with a dollar component can be worth more than a higher base without one, depending on the exchange rate the month you are paid.

What we are doing about it

This is why we started Salary Data. It shows ranges by role and level rather than single numbers. We combine public sources where they exist with what we see in live searches, and we collect anonymous submissions from people doing the work so the data stays current. If you work in Nigerian tech, adding your own salary takes a couple of minutes and makes the picture better for everyone.

Salary Data sits next to our Market Maps, which show who leads engineering, product and growth at the country's top startups. Together they answer the two questions we hear most from founders: who is out there, and what will it cost to hire them.

If you are hiring for a senior role and want a calibrated view of the market before you set the band, talk to us.