What seven US travel companies pay software engineers — and what the filings don't show

PhocusWire reported this week that tech-first travel companies in the US pay software engineers materially more than hospitality groups do. The finding came from our 2026 Travel Tech Salary Guide, and the underlying data is employer-level filings made to the US Department of Labor.

We are publishing that data in full here, along with the rules that decided which employers appear in it and a plain account of what this kind of data can and cannot tell you.

Median base salary, software developers

Every employer below filed five or more software developer applications in the period. Figures are median annual base salary in USD.

The US national median for software developers is $135,980 (BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025). Every employer above sits over it.

The sector splits into two groups. Tech-first travel companies run from $191,000 to $204,583. Hospitality groups run from $148,610 to $161,278. There is no overlap between them.

Expedia is the case that complicates the picture. It sits with the hospitality group at $149,240 despite being an online travel company, and it has by far the largest filing population in the dataset at 148 — more than three times any other employer. That volume pulls its median toward the weight of mid-level roles rather than describing the top of its pay scale.

Why Hyatt and Wyndham are not in the table

We used a minimum of five filings per employer per occupation. Below that a median describes a handful of individual offers rather than an employer's pay position, and it moves several thousand dollars if one filing changes.

Two large hotel groups fall below that line, so it is worth saying what their numbers look like. Wyndham files under more than one entity and appears twice:

All three sit inside or just below the published hospitality range. The two large hotel groups that missed the threshold behave like the three that made it, which is a useful check on the finding rather than a gap in it.

What this data is

The figures come from Labor Condition Applications — the filings a US employer makes when sponsoring a worker for an H-1B, H-1B1 or E-3 visa. The Department of Labor publishes them quarterly as public records.

Four things follow from that, and they matter more than the headline.

It covers sponsored roles only. These are not payroll figures and they are not a sample of everyone an employer hires. They describe the roles a company sponsored for a visa, which skews toward mid and senior engineers and toward companies that sponsor at scale.

It is base salary only. No equity, no bonus, no benefits. At the tech-first end of this table, equity is a large part of total compensation and none of it appears here.

It is a six-month window. Certified and certified-withdrawn determinations issued between 1 October 2025 and 31 March 2026, being the first half of the US federal fiscal year 2026. Of the 390 travel technology filings in the set, 380 are certified and 10 certified-withdrawn.

Filing volume shapes the median. An employer with 148 filings and one with five are not measured with the same precision, and their medians should not be read as equally firm.

A worked example of the last point

Airbnb's 39 filings produce a median of $191,000. The distribution behind it is the interesting part:

$162,000   2 filings
$188,000   1
$191,000  21
$196,000   6
$204,000   6
$214,000   1
$227,000   1
$248,000   1Copy

Twenty-one of thirty-nine filings — 54% — sit on exactly $191,000. That is not what a real distribution of engineering salaries looks like. It is what a standardised internal band looks like when it is filed repeatedly.

So Airbnb's median is a precise figure describing a filing practice, not a measure of pay dispersion across its engineering organisation. The same caution applies wherever a single value dominates an employer's filings, and it is a good reason to treat any one of these medians as a reference point rather than a verdict.

Airbnb also files under two spellings of its own name, which have to be merged before the median is calculated. The figure above is the merged one across all 39.

The split is not only in engineering

The same pattern appears in two other occupations where the filing counts clear the threshold.

Data scientists. Airbnb's median is $178,000 across 6 filings against Expedia's $129,709 across 28. The US national median for data scientists is $120,230 (BLS OEWS, May 2025).

IT project managers. Navan's median is $210,000 across 6 filings against Expedia's $167,024 across 18.

Two occupations is not a general law, but it does suggest the divide is not something specific to software engineering. It looks like a difference in how these two kinds of company price technical work.

What it means if you are hiring

The practical risk is benchmarking against a national figure. A hospitality group calibrating an engineering offer against $135,980 is anchored roughly $55,000 below where the tech-first end of its own sector is filing, and will lose candidates it never realises it was competing for.

The gap is not a fixed percentage and we would not present it as one. It varies depending on which employers you compare. What is firm is the two ranges: $148,610 to $161,278 on one side, $191,000 to $204,583 on the other, with nothing in between.

Sources. US Department of Labor, Office of Foreign Labor Certification, LCA disclosure data, FY2026 H1 (determinations issued 1 October 2025 to 31 March 2026). US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025. Both are US public records.

The two-tier finding was first reported by PhocusWire on 28 July 2026.

Full UK and US salary bands across engineering, product, data, sales, marketing and customer success are in the 2026 Travel Tech Salary Guide.