AI skills boost engineer pay by up to 25%, NodeFlair finds

The report shows AI capability now commands a clear salary premium across engineering roles.

Software engineers with AI-related skills earn up to 25% more than their peers, according to NodeFlair’s Tech Salary Report 2026.

The report by the recruitment firm for tech talent analysed over 230,000 verified salary data points across roles and markets. It found that Singapore engineers with AI capabilities receive a pay premium of 13% to 25%, depending on seniority.

NodeFlair said the gap reflects stronger compensation for engineers who can apply AI tools in production environments, rather than general software development skills alone.

The report also noted that the AI-linked premium appears across career levels, with higher increases observed amongst more experienced engineers who are expected to integrate AI into system design and delivery.

“AI fluency is no longer a nice-to-have — it’s now a salary advantage,” said Ethan Ang, founder of NodeFlair.

He said the shift had accelerated with wider adoption of AI-assisted coding tools and agentic workflows, which have changed how engineering teams approach software development.

Reaching the people who run Asia's businesses is harder than it used to be.

Inboxes are crowded. Attention is short. The executives you most want to reach — the founders, CFOs, and operators who actually move budgets — are the hardest to find through the usual channels. If you're building a company, a category, or a reputation, you already know this.

We've spent twenty years building the room they read. Singapore Business Review is where senior decision makers in Singapore and across Southeast Asia come for business coverage they can't get elsewhere — in print, online, and in person at the summits and roundtables we host across seven markets.

If you have something these readers should know about — a point of view worth publishing, a product worth their attention, an event worth their time — we'd like to hear what you're trying to do.

Book a meeting

| Or download the media kit (PDF)

240,000 senior readers quarterly in print Top 1,700 Singapore companies reached

7 markets across Southeast Asia