Iran’s Programmers Share a Floor. Only the Ceiling Moves.

Much of what is written in English about Iranian technology leans on the same unpriced asset: a large, cheap, well trained developer base. The claim is usually made without a number behind it, because the numbers are in Persian, on job boards, in files whose text layer does not survive copying. JobVision asked 4,405 programmers what they were paid in the year to 19 March 2020 and published the answer in a 57 page report. Tehran Index has read it page by page. The useful part is not the average. It is that the report prints a whole distribution, and the distribution says something the average hides.

The floor is national. The ceiling is not.

JobVision cut its sample twelve ways: by gender, by city, by self-described seniority, and by measured years of experience. For each cut it printed six markers, from the 5th percentile to the 95th. Line the twelve up and the shape is immediate. At the top of each cut the figures run from 5.0 million toman a month to 19.4, a spread of 3.88 times. At the bottom they run from 1.7 to 2.4, a spread of 1.41 times, and ten of the twelve sit at either 1.7 or 1.8 million toman. A woman and a man, a programmer in Tehran and a programmer outside the seven cities the report names, a self-described Junior and a self-described Senior: at the fifth percentile they are all paid the same thing.

One cut does move the floor, and it is worth naming because of which one it is. Measured experience lifts the 5th percentile from 1.7 million toman for programmers with under two years to 2.4 million for those with ten years and above, a rise of 41 per cent. The seniority ladder, where the respondent chose the label, does not: Junior starts at 1.7 and Senior at 1.8. Years in the job raise the worst-paid case. Calling yourself senior does not. Both measures move the top of the range hard, the Senior label to 16 million toman at the 95th percentile and ten years and above to 19.4.

The gender gap is entirely above the median

Read the gender page one marker at a time and it stops being a single number. At the 5th percentile women and men are paid identically, 1.7 million toman. At the 25th they are identical again, 1.9. The two lines separate at the median, 2.6 against 3.2, and keep separating: 71.7 per cent of the male figure at the 75th percentile, and 58.2 per cent at the 95th, where a woman is on 6.4 million toman and a man on 11. On the means, which is the comparison most reports would print on its own, women are at 76.7 per cent of men.

What this is not: an adjusted gap. JobVision does not cross its gender cut with seniority, specialty or city, and women are 869 of 4,408 responses, 19.7 per cent. Some of the distance at the top will be composition rather than pay for the same work, and the report gives no way to separate the two. What survives that caveat is the shape. Whatever is holding the bottom of this market in place holds it equally for both, and whatever opens above the median opens much further for one than the other.

Outside Tehran, programming is freelance work

The city cut has the same floor and a much lower ceiling: Tehran averages 4.7 million toman, the six large cities the report names 3.4, and everywhere else 2.9. At the 95th percentile Tehran reaches 11.1 million toman against 6.0 outside the seven named cities, 1.85 times. The report prints its own definitions on the method page, which is rarer than it should be: Tehran is its own group, the second group is Karaj, Mashhad, Isfahan, Tabriz, Shiraz and Ahvaz, and the third is every other city in the country.

The employment page explains part of it and complicates the rest. Across the whole sample 2,780 programmers were in permanent jobs and 1,628 freelance, 63 against 37 per cent. Split that by city and it inverts: 77 per cent permanent in Tehran, 49 per cent in the six large cities, and 33 per cent everywhere else. Two thirds of the programmers in the rest of Iran were not employed by anyone. For a country whose technology companies are concentrated in one city, that is the labour market telling you where the companies are. It also means the city pay gap and the employment gap are measuring overlapping things, and this report does not let anyone separate them.

What the stack looked like

The specialty page is a census of what 4,408 Iranian programmers were actually writing in the year to 19 March 2020, and the leader is not what a reader outside Iran would guess. ASP.NET is the single largest specialty at 756 people, 17.15 per cent, ahead of Java at 583, PHP at 548 and HTML, CSS and JavaScript at 469. Android is 372 and Python 355. At the bottom of the same list sit Blockchain with 6 respondents, Ruby on Rails with 5 and NoSql with 3. JobVision names the nine specialties whose sample it judged too small to report separately, which is a disclosure worth having.

The cross-check, and why it is ours to run

A single self-selected survey from one job board is one observation. The reason this one is worth publishing is that Tehran Index holds a second. Iran Talent ran its own salary survey of 5,000 programmers for the same year and published the average monthly net pay of programming and software development specialists in Tehran: 4.4 million toman. JobVision’s Tehran mean, across all levels, is 4.7 million. The definitions are not the same, and that matters: Iran Talent is reporting one organisational level, JobVision is reporting everyone in Tehran. But two independent surveys, 9,405 programmers between them, run by two different companies, land 0.3 million toman apart on the same job in the same year. Iran Talent’s figures for the levels above also sit inside JobVision’s range, at 6.6 million toman for middle managers and 9.2 for senior managers against a JobVision Senior mean of 6.9.

That cross-check is the own-data anchor, and it comes with an uncomfortable reading of our own coverage. Across 3,980 public facts on 385 public company records in the Tehran Index registry, re-queried on 18 October 2026, 80 carry a monthly salary level, and all 80 sit on one record. JobVision holds 27 public facts and not one of them is a pay level. The wage side of Iran’s digital economy rests, in our record and in the English record generally, on a single publisher. It should not.

An arithmetic note the report does not flag

The cover of the participant section says 4,405 people. Every percentage in the report is computed on 4,408: the gender split sums to it, so do the experience bands, the seniority levels, the employment types and all 24 specialty rows, and 756 divided by 4,408 gives exactly the 17.15 per cent printed next to ASP.NET. The residence table is the exception and sums to 4,034, which is 374 fewer people than every other breakdown. The city pay charts rest on that smaller base. None of this changes a reading of the report, and all of it should be stated by anyone quoting it.

What we do not know

We do not know whether the floor is a legal minimum. It looks like one, and this desk has not read a source that establishes Iran’s statutory minimum wage for that year, so the observation stays an observation. We do not know how representative either sample is: both are self-selected users of a job board, which skews towards people who are looking, and 43.6 per cent of JobVision’s respondents had under two years of experience. We do not know what any of these figures are worth today. They are six years old, and this desk does not convert Iranian pay into dollars, because a conversion is only as good as the rate behind it and publishing a rate series is the fastest way to turn a record into a guess. The newest pay level on our record is Iran Talent’s 26.5 million toman for software development specialists in Tehran province, from data collected to 21 September 2024, and nothing here should be read forward to it. Finally, we do not know what the gender gap looks like adjusted, because neither publisher has published the cross-cut that would show it.

What we do know is that in the year measured, two Iranian job boards independently read the same job, the floor of that market did not move for gender, for city, or for a self-assigned title, and the distance between a programmer at the bottom and a programmer at the top was already 3.88 times. Tehran Index has measured what it costs an Iranian technology company to borrow, and read what the venture-backed companies whose accounts exist in public turn over, where sixteen of twenty one technology names came in under 100 billion toman a year. At that size the wage bill is not a detail. It has simply never been published in English.