Bursting Bubbles

Summer Interns at Tech Start-Ups Are Making Six-Figure Salaries

It’s not so bad being an intern when you’re making thousands of dollars a month.
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It’s no secret that tech companies pay well across the board—even as an intern, you can earn a six-figure annual salary. According to a survey released this week by a student at Berkeley, summer interns at Twitter stand to make $8,400 per month, plus another $6,000 in benefits, while at Snapchat, they can earn $10,000 every month, plus another $1,500 per month to cover housing costs. If you annualize those numbers, an intern at a tech company like Pinterest, which pays $9,000 per month, would be looking at a six-figure salary in a year’s time.

University of California at Berkeley student Rodney Folz surveyed other students who had completed internships with tech companies to find out how much they’d made at their respective companies. He’s planning to anonymize and release the raw data. Business Insider first wrote about Folz’s data on Tuesday, and the tech companies listed in the survey hadn’t responded to the publication’s requests to confirm the accuracy of the numbers. But the data is mostly aligned with other figures from Glassdoor, which has its own intern-tracking tool. The national average annual salary for an intern, Glassdoor says, is about $33,120, which you could make in just three and a half months as an intern at Snapchat, if Folz’s numbers are accurate. Here’s his full set of findings:

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Some tech start-ups offer company-specific perks, like credits for Uber or Airbnb, in addition to monthly salaries of $6,000 or more. Apple, Google, Amazon, and Yahoo neared the bottom of Folz’s list, salary-wise, while start-ups like Pinterest, Snapchat, Slack, and Palantir are reportedly more lucrative. A couple of years ago, teen venture-capitalist Tiffany Zhong released a similar set of data about summer tech-internship salaries, and the numbers in Folz’s survey are similar to Zhong’s. In spite of the recent turbulence in Silicon Valley, the market for tech interns, at least, appears to have remained steady.