What SDRs actually get paid, read off the job postings themselves.

How the sample was built

Pay transparency law in New York City, New York State, California, Colorado, Washington and Illinois requires a salary range on the job posting. Applicant tracking systems publish those postings through public syndication APIs, which is what powers the job listings you see on company websites. We read those APIs directly.

Nearly two thirds of US SDR postings published no pay range at all. That is the single biggest limitation here, and it is stated up front rather than buried: if the employers who stay quiet pay differently, this median is off in a direction we cannot measure.

The base salary numbers

Robustness check. Five postings quoted an hourly rate, which we annualised at 2,080 hours. Drop those five and the median moves to $62,500 on n = 41. A $500 move, so the headline is not an artifact of that conversion.

Watch the word "range". 19 of the 46 postings publish a range whose bottom equals its top. Two in five advertised ranges are a single number wearing a range's clothes.

No city-level numbers, and why

We wanted medians for New York, San Francisco, Boston, Seattle, Denver, Los Angeles and Chicago. We set a floor of 8 postings per metro before publishing one. Not a single metro reached it. The best were San Francisco and Boston at 6 postings each, then Chicago at 5, New York at 4, Denver at 3. Seattle and Los Angeles returned none.

The honest reason is that many employers post one nationwide range instead of a city range, so the location on the posting stops carrying the information we needed. City medians are the first thing we go after in the next collection.

Where we disagree with the survey everyone cites

The standard reference is The Bridge Group's 2025 SDR report, which surveys 351 B2B companies. Per the Bridge Group (2025), n = 351: median SDR OTE of $80K, split $55K base and $25K variable. Source: The Bridge Group 2025 SDR report.

Our observed base median runs $8,000 higher, about 15%. We think the gap is real rather than an error, and the reason is who is in each sample. Bridge Group surveys a broad B2B population at $47M median revenue. We observed venture-backed tech and B2B SaaS companies that were actively hiring, weighted toward cities with disclosure law. A SaaS company posting an SDR role in Boston this month advertises more base than the median B2B employer reports paying.

These two numbers are not interchangeable and this study does not replace that one. Bridge Group measures total earnings across a wider population with a far larger sample. We measured advertised base inside our own customer profile, on one day.

Base is not the cost of an SDR

Three different numbers get called "what an SDR costs" and they are routinely mixed up. They stack. They do not compete.

If you are budgeting a hire, the third line is the one that hits your P&L. The first line is what you put in the job posting.

Method, in full

• Sources. Public ATS syndication APIs from Greenhouse, Ashby and Lever. No login, no scraping of logged-in sites, no LinkedIn automation.
• Titles included. Sales development, business development representative, SDR, BDR, ADR, MDR, account development and market development representative.
• Titles excluded. Manager, director, head of, lead, VP, intern, and any non-selling role that matched on a keyword.
• Extraction. Only the structured pay field and its own label. We never searched the job description for dollar signs, because that picks up funding totals and customer savings claims and calls them salary.
• Base versus OTE. Read from the label on each figure, never assumed. One posting can publish a base range, a variable range and an OTE range, and we keep them apart. Commission-only figures are never folded into either median.
• Units. Hourly rates were annualised at 2,080 hours and flagged. Where a label and the number itself disagreed on units, the number won and the row was flagged. One posting labelled a figure of $82,000 to $97,000 as an hourly rate.
• Exclusions. Non-US, non-USD, contract and part-time roles, and any range whose top exceeded three times its bottom, which is a compliance gesture rather than data. Every exclusion is logged with its reason.
• Deduplication. Same company, same title, same range, same metro counts once.

Limitations

1. One day. Every figure is a snapshot of what was open on 2026-08-28. It is not a trend and should not be read as one.
2. Tech weighted. Greenhouse, Ashby and Lever skew toward venture-backed B2B software. That is deliberate, because it is the market we work in, but it means this is not the SDR market as a whole and we do not describe it that way.
3. Advertised, not paid. A posted range is what an employer will commit to print. It is not what the offer settles at.
4. The silent majority. 62.9% of US postings we found published no range and are absent from every number above.
5. Convenience sample. Company names were guessed against board addresses. A miss means the wrong address or a different system, never that a company has no SDR opening.

Check our work

Every posting in this study is recorded with its live URL and the timestamp we read it. Open any of them and check the number against what we wrote down. Postings close over time, so some links will expire, and the timestamp records the state we observed.

We will re-run this. The two things we are chasing next are enough OTE postings to publish a median and enough postings per city to publish city numbers.