Salary Survey Extra is a series of periodic dispatches that give added insight into the findings of our most recent Salary Survey. These posts contain previously unpublished Salary Survey data.

The Salary Survey, each year, tends to focus a lot of attention on conditions and circumstances in the United States. We can't entirely escape from that, since certified IT professionals who live and work in the United States are by far the biggest contributors to the survey. Roughly 52 percent of all certified professionals to participate in the 2020 Salary Survey are U.S. residents.

There are, of course, a not inconsiderable number of certified professionals who weigh in from other countries. The problem is that most of them weigh in from separate and distinct countries. India, which accounted for 11.7 percent of all Salary Survey respondents, is second to the United States in terms of total representation.

That being the case, most readers can probably see with it's hard to paint pictures, except in broad strokes, using our international survey data. Today, however, we're going to use some of those broad strokes.

For the 2020 Salary Survey, the average annual salary of all U.S. respondents is $102,880. We can't say how every country that produced survey responses compares. On the other hand, we do have some sizable samples other than from India. So we took the 12 non-U.S. nations with the highest numbers of respondents, and averaged the annual salaries of all respondents from each country.

For the sake of consistency, and also because it simplifies work on the calculating and reporting end of things, we ask survey participants to report their salary in U.S. dollars. So we have two sets of numbers here: the average salary in U.S. dollars, and a converted figure based on the current rate of exchange (as of today, Oct. 29) with each of the countries represented. Take a look:

As we said last year, this is ordinarily the part where we'd offer a few paragraphs or sentences of analysis. Because we're not familiar with the cost of living in the various nations represented, however, this is one time when we have to let the numbers more or less speak for themselves.