These companies are paying designers the most

As Fast Company wrapped up its latest report on the state of the design jobs market, we wondered which companies paid the highest premium for designers. 

We looked at the 40,000 job listings we’d gathered from Google’s job search engine, over a period between December 2024 and February 2025, and zeroed in on the salaries that companies were offering to prospective employees across various different experience levels (entry level, 2–3 years, 4–5 years, 6–7 years, and anything above 8 years). 

We then averaged the salaries for all jobs that a company posted across these various experience levels and identified the seven highest spenders from each of seven categories: architects, game designers, graphic designers, urban designers, interior designers, product designers, and UX designers.

The good news: Not every designer needs to be in the latter half of their career to reach the highest salaried heights. The bad news: All architects actually do need to be.

Architects

Architects face a thankless pay curve: earning a top rate means coming with top experience. All the highest paid positions, mostly at big firms like HNTB and Michael Baker, require senior-level experience of at least eight years. But architecture is also the only type of design we looked at where the top paying employer includes a food company—those upscaled La Colombe interiors don’t come cheap. 

Game Designers

As Fast Company has reported, the best door into the world of game design might not be at a gaming studio: Netflix is continuing its push into gaming, and it stands out among hiring organizations for offering the highest salary for game designers with fewer years of experience than bona fide game studios do. But don’t count those studios out: CD Projekt Red and Riot Games still make the list of the seven highest-paying companies for game designers.

Graphic Designers

Graphic designers are typically among the lowest paid in the design profession, but they might top out their salaries the fastest: The most generous hiring companies, with the exception of ServiceNow and Nvidia, don’t request senior-level status: Graphite and Crocs only ask for 2–3 years of experience. And apparently, the Prince George’s Parks Department in Maryland, has enough funding to duke it out with Nvidia for talent.

Interior Designers

Like architects, interior designers need to come equipped with senior-level experience to command top pay, with no employer among our top seven listed asking for fewer than eight years. And unlike other job types with at least a mild diversity of hiring organizations at their upper limit, all the top organizations seeking interior designers are design firms like HKS and Solize.

Product Designers

Netflix is the only company on our list to make the highest spot in two separate design categories—game designers and product designers—and its job listings for senior product designers offer the highest salaries on that list, at an average of $427,000. But Netflix’s average salary for midlevel product designers doesn’t lag far behind, at an average of $317,000, just after Anthropic, which is sparing no expense to make experiencing Claude’s profuse apologies as frictionless and stable as possible. 

Urban Designers

Urban design shows the smallest variance in how much their top organizations are willing to pay, with the narrowest band of salaries at the upper levels. Pay tops out at $169,500, and as you would expect, the most generous organizations are all in the engineering consulting, design, and construction business. 

UX Designers

Tanium is the kind of company that few people outside an IT department would ever interact with but that seemingly every IT department does. It provides an endpoint management system demanding a particularly sophisticated set of UX chops, which it pays handsomely for, and which one doesn’t need to be a senior-level UX designer to earn. Tanium’s top designers can expect to make $377,500 with only 4–5 years of experience. The list of top-paying companies is rounded out with a few usual suspects, like Google and ServiceNow, as well as Blue Origin, which is probably spending its money well in hiring designers to determine how we get back from space. 

This article is part of Fast Company‘s continuing coverage of where the design jobs are, including this year’s comprehensive analysis of 170,000 job listings