If you want to earn six figures, you may consider working at a technology company—as an intern.
Summer interns at Snapchat were offered $10,000 per month, plus $1,500 per month in housing, according to a survey released on Monday. Pinterest wasn’t far behind at $9,000 in monthly pay for interns, a $1,000 relocation budget, and $3,000 per month in housing. Twitter (TWTR) offered $8,400 per month plus $6,000 in benefits.
In other words, interns could make six figures, if their summer internship salaries were extended to a year.
The findings come from a Rodney Folz, a student a University of California at Berkeley who surveyed fellow students about the amount of money they will make this summer working as interns at prominent technology companies. The data, compiled from 510 respondents, clearly shows that being a tech intern is lucrative.
However, without seeing the employment letters directly, it’s impossible to know whether the salaries the UC Berkeley students claimed were accurate. The companies did not immediately respond to a request for confirmation about Folz’s data, which was reported earlier by Business Insider.
Get Data Sheet, Coins2Day’s technology newsletter.
Interestingly, bigger Silicon Valley companies, including Apple (AAPL) and Google (GOOGL), weren’t so willing to shell out all that cash to interns, respondents to Folz’s data claim. In fact, Apple is reportedly offering $6,700 per month plus a $1,000-per-month housing cap. Google keeps things simple with $6,600 per month and $9,000 in benefits over the summer, according to Folz’s data.
While Folz’s data may not be representative of every type of internship the companies offer, the pay was somewhat in line with what interns were getting in 2014. At that time, the National Association of Colleges and Employers reported that the average U.S. Undergraduate earned $16 an hour, or $2,500 per month as interns. Technology interns made substantially more: Twitter interns at that time, for instance, made about $6,800 per month.
For more about Snapchat, watch:
Glassdoor, a site that tracks salaries and lets employees review their employers, also provides an intern-tracking tool. That company found that the national average annual salary for interns is about $33,120. Glassdoor, which also lists individual internship pay by company, says Amazon (AMZN) software development engineer interns make more than $6,200 per month. Meanwhile, Microsoft (MSFT) pays nearly $6,800 per month for software development engineering interns. Glassdoor’s data, which says software engineer interns at Google make $7,175 per month, was roughly similar to Folz’s findings.
Intern salaries, however, vary based on several factors including the business unit involved, the position, and an individual’s desirability. There are also a lot of interns making nothing—either because they’re working for school credit or their employers don’t pay interns. Still, working in the technology field in Silicon Valley seems like a great way to make some cash.
💰 state of top tech internship offers, 2016 #talkpay pic.twitter.com/Mkp5XWQyuE
— haute rod (@rodneyfolz) April 26, 2016
For his part, Folz says that he will release the raw data from his findings after he has anonymized the information he received from respondents. He told Coins2Day in an interview that he conducted the survey to help students get a leg up on employers.
“Knowing your market worth helps rebalance power away from employers to employees when negotiating,” Folz told Coins2Day. “And I think students should know their work has real value and be compensated accordingly.”
