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 pays US employees.

TikTok is hiring aggressively in the US where competition from big-tech rivals is heating up.

The app's user base exploded in 2021, 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 from users. TikTok laid off some staffers earlier this year as restructured its advertising team. But the company is still hiring, with more than 1,300 US job openings currently listed on its website.

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

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The mounting political pressure against TikTok — its parent company, ByteDance, is based in China, which has raised concerns about user data privacy on the app — hasn't yet dampened the short-video platform's popularity in the US, either.

Insider updated its analysis of how much TikTok employees make in the US, based on 1,135 US work-visa applications with salary data for more than 500 different jobs.

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

It shows, for example, that TikTok offers $100,000 per year or more for certain content-operations roles, and that ByteDance offers as much as $200,000 per year for software engineers for its AR-effects platform.

Overall, TikTok and ByteDance offered certain staffers between October 2020 and September 2022 base salaries ranging from $29 an hour to $438,000 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.

Read more about how much TikTok employees make, including recent salary offers for specific roles