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Web developers

Also called Front-end developer, Frontend developer, Front end developer, Website developer, WordPress developer

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 70,190 US web developers, with median pay of $92,650 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2021, the highest was 88,620, in May 2022. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 5,000 from 1995, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for web developers: Cloud deployment, serverless, and Jamstack, 2017 to 2022. Cloud-deployment platforms simultaneously lowered the barrier to shipping a web application (no server management) and raised the value of developers who understood the full cloud services landscape.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects employment to grow 3.8% from 2025 to 2035.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

AI exposure studies

  • 63.5% of this job's tasks are exposed to large language models. Not a forecast of job losses. Eloundou and others, 2023
  • 29% of work tasks in computer and mathematical occupations, this job's group, are exposed to automation by AI. Not a forecast of job losses. Goldman Sachs, 2023

Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. BLS publishes these counts as yearly survey snapshots and cautions against reading them as a precise trend.

Last updated .

Cite this page
APA

Future History. (2026, October 11). Web developers: jobs and pay since 1995 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/15-1254

Chicago

Future History. "Web developers: jobs and pay since 1995." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/15-1254.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_15_1254, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Web developers: jobs and pay since 1995}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/15-1254}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }

The access date is today's date on your device.

drag to travel through time
2000now
Country
2026
Known then as Web programmer / web author (informal, pre-profession era)
Known then as Webmaster / web designer (early commercial internet era)
Known then as Web Developer / Web Programmer (dot-com and post-bubble eras; BLS tracked as Computer Programmers or 15-1021)
Known then as Web Developers (BLS SOC 15-1134, 2010 SOC)
Known then as Web Developers (BLS SOC 15-1254, 2018 SOC)
Known today as Web Developers (BLS SOC 15-1254, 2018 SOC)
Projected to still be called Web Developers (BLS SOC 15-1254, 2018 SOC)
Data from the May 2025 survey
US Employment
70K
Est.

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic
Report an error
Median Annual Wage
$92,650
Est.

≈ $90,275 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic
Report an error
Beat · 1991

August 6, 1991: Tim Berners-Lee publishes the first public description of the World Wide Web on the alt.hypertext newsgroup, making the source code freely available. The message begins: "The WorldWideWeb (WWW) project aims to allow links to be made to any information anywhere." He built the first web server on a NeXT workstation in his office at CERN in Geneva. The first US web server followed at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in December 1991. The first web page, at info.cern.ch, explained what the web was and how to use it.

Beat · 1993

January 23, 1993: NCSA Mosaic version 0.5 is released by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. For the first time, a web browser can display images inline with text on a Windows or Mac computer. On April 30, 1993, CERN places the WorldWideWeb source code in the public domain, releasing it royalty-free. These two events together open the web to a mass audience: Mosaic makes it visually compelling, CERN's release makes it legally free to build on. By the end of 1993 there are 500 known web servers globally.

Beat · 1995

August 9, 1995: Netscape Communications Corporation goes public. The IPO raises more capital in a single day than many established companies manage in years; more tech IPO capital was raised in 1995 ($8.4 billion) than in any previous year in US history. The Netscape IPO is widely credited as the trigger for the dot-com investment wave that would employ tens of thousands of web developers over the following five years. It also marks the arrival of the "webmaster" as a named job title at companies across every industry: nearly every Fortune 500 company began building a web presence in 1995-1996, and someone had to build it.

Beat · 2001

The dot-com bubble collapses. Between March 2000 and October 2002, the NASDAQ Composite falls 78%. Hundreds of dot-com companies close, and web developer employment contracts sharply. Hacker News retrospectives from developers who lived through the bust describe the sudden evaporation of entry-level web developer positions and the consolidation of work into more senior, multi-skilled practitioners. The important structural fact, however, is that IT employment overall fell surprisingly little despite the investment collapse: the internet infrastructure built during the boom remained, and the practical web development work of maintaining e-commerce platforms, content management systems, and corporate intranets continued.

Beat · 2003

May 27, 2003: WordPress is launched by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little as a fork of the b2/cafelog blogging system. WordPress would eventually power over 40% of all websites on the internet, creating one of the largest single-employer categories in the web developer job market: the WordPress specialist. The platform made web development accessible to clients who could not afford bespoke development, and it created a large professional community of developers who specialised in theme development, plugin authoring, and WordPress customisation for small and medium businesses. The WordPress ecosystem represents the core market segment that AI site generators like 10Web (launched 2023) and WP Engine's Genesis AI are now directly targeting.

Beat · 2008

April 10, 2008: GitHub launches publicly. Within months, the Ruby on Rails community adopts GitHub and the entire Ruby developer ecosystem follows. GitHub becomes the de facto public portfolio, collaboration platform, and hiring signal for web developers globally. By 2012, Git is the most popular version control system among developers. By 2018, when Microsoft acquires GitHub for $7.5 billion, it hosts over 28 million developers and 57 million repositories. The GitHub model of open-source collaboration and public code as professional credential reshapes web development hiring: a developer's public GitHub profile becomes a substitute for (or supplement to) a formal degree in many hiring contexts.

Beat · 2024

The European Accessibility Act becomes enforceable across the European Union in June 2025, requiring that public-facing digital products meet WCAG 2.2 accessibility standards or face penalties. Simultaneously, the BLS reports that web developer employment has declined to 78,860 (May 2024), down from 112,820 in 2013. The bifurcation of the profession is now structurally visible: the segment producing boilerplate marketing sites and simple e-commerce stores has contracted under AI generator competition, while the segment handling accessibility compliance, performance engineering, and complex integrations is sustaining wage growth. The median annual wage reached $90,930 in 2024, a 34% increase from the 2013 mean salary of $67,540.

How to read this number

OEWS is a point-in-time survey snapshot, not a continuous time series; BLS advises against using it for year-over-year trend comparison.

Each dot is a cited figure over time; the dotted line only links them (values between aren't measured). Hollow dots are estimates.

Official statistic: Copied by a script from a statistics agency table or a published study's table, not retyped by hand. BLS figures and the forecast and exposure tables are also re-checked against that table on every data run. Researched context: Researched from the cited source rather than copied from it by a script, so it is not machine-checked yet. Spot a mistake? Each figure has a “Report an error” link.

Cited forecasts · present → 2035

Will AI replace web developers? What the research says

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than an average.

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, the spread is the honest signal.

What published forecasts say
Forecast change in the number of people doing this work, as published by each named source. Bars share one scale on every role, centred on zero and reaching the end at ±30%. Grey marks a small change, 3% or less either way.
BLS Employment Projections 2025-35
→ 2035
+3.8%
BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 15-1254 (Web developers): 87.4 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 90.6 thousand in 2035, a change of +3.3 thousand (+3.8%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers (17.5% of this occupation in 2025). The average for all occupations in this cycle is +3.5%.
Official statisticReport an error
How exposed is this work to AI (research measures)
Scores as published by each study. Each row says what it measures. These measure what AI could technically do, not forecasts of jobs lost.
Eloundou et al. (2023), "GPTs are GPTs"
2023 study · Share of tasks exposed to LLMs (β, human-rated)
63.5%
of tasks
What this measures

Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 15-1254.00 Web Developers. Shown: human-rated β = 0.635, the share of the occupation's tasks an LLM could do in at least half the time at equal quality, counting tasks that need LLM-powered software at half weight (β = E1 + 0.5 × E2). Other published measures for this occupation: human-rated α (LLM alone) 0.308 and γ (all LLM-assisted) 0.962; GPT-4-rated β 0.933. This measures how much of the work an LLM could touch, not how many jobs disappear.

Official statisticReport an error
Goldman Sachs (Briggs & Kodnani, 2023), "The Potentially Large Effects of Artificial Intelligence on Economic Growth"
2023 study · Share of work tasks exposed to automation by AI, all computer and mathematical occupations (US)
29%
of tasks
What this measures

Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research scored the task content of each US occupation for exposure to automation by generative AI and weighted by OEWS employment. Exhibit 5 (US panel) reports 29% for computer and mathematical occupations, the occupational group this role belongs to; the report publishes no figure for individual occupations. It measures how much of the group's work AI could automate, not how many jobs disappear, and it is a 2023 estimate, not a forecast for a later year.

Official statisticReport an error
Today, in this role

What's changing day to day for web developers

Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.

AI is taking this onBuild and deliver small-business marketing sites, landing pages, and portfolio sites: work that Bolt.new, Lovable, and v0 now generate end-to-end from a plain-English prompt in 10-30 minutes, compressing what was once a multi-day freelance engagement into an automated scaffold the client can self-serve.

Build and deliver small-business marketing sites, landing pages, and portfolio sites: work that Bolt.new, Lovable, and v0 now generate end-to-end from a plain-English prompt in 10-30 minutes, compressing what was once a multi-day freelance engagement into an automated scaffold the client can self-serve.[6],[5],[4]

Where your edge is

Stop competing on site creation speed; position on what the generators cannot deliver: bespoke integrations (payment flows, CRM sync, inventory APIs), accessibility compliance, and performance audits. Charge for outcomes, not hours of HTML.

AI is sitting alongside you herePrototype and iterate on new UI features by prompting v0 or Bolt.new for an initial scaffold, then extending the AI-generated component with custom logic, state management, and API wiring inside Cursor or Windsurf, compressing what was a multi-day spike into a same-day working demo.

Prototype and iterate on new UI features by prompting v0 or Bolt.new for an initial scaffold, then extending the AI-generated component with custom logic, state management, and API wiring inside Cursor or Windsurf, compressing what was a multi-day spike into a same-day working demo.[4],[11]

Where your edge is

Treat AI-generated prototypes as throw-away scaffolding: own the architectural decision of whether to refactor the AI output or rewrite with proper component structure; the judgment call on when generated code is fit for production is permanently human.

AI is sitting alongside you hereWrite, review, and maintain React / Vue / Svelte component code using AI pair-programming editors (Cursor, Windsurf, GitHub Copilot), accepting or rejecting AI-generated completions based on correctness, performance, and alignment with the project's design system.

Write, review, and maintain React / Vue / Svelte component code using AI pair-programming editors (Cursor, Windsurf, GitHub Copilot), accepting or rejecting AI-generated completions based on correctness, performance, and alignment with the project's design system.[2],[12]

Where your edge is

Develop a systematic review practice for AI-generated frontend code: run Lighthouse and axe-core on every AI-authored component, enforce design-token compliance, and build the judgment to reject visually correct but semantically broken output.

Where web developers go next

Natural next steps for someone with your foundation: not exits, evolutions.

What each move takes

A direction you could grow

Software Developers

Web Developers already write production JavaScript and manage deployment pipelines; the pivot adds backend systems, algorithms, and computer science depth. McKinsey finds the strongest demand for engineers who can architect systems and review AI output, which requires the broader SWE skill set.

What you'd add
· Data structures and algorithms (LeetCode-style proficiency for interviews)
· Backend language depth: Node.js/TypeScript server-side, Go, or Python
· Cloud platforms: AWS or GCP beyond basic hosting (IAM, VPC, managed databases)
What it takesSome new skills to pick up
Tools of the era

How has the work of web developers changed since 1991?

The tools that defined the work, one line per era. Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.

  • WorldWideWeb browser + HTTP/HTML (Berners-Lee, CERN, 1991)

    The first web developers worked with a suite of tools that Berners-Lee had built himself: the WorldWideWeb browser (the only browser in existence, running on NeXT workstations), an HTTP server, and the HTML markup language. There were no text editors designed for HTML, no frameworks, no version control tailored to web work. Developers wrote raw HTML in general-purpose text editors, configured Unix HTTP servers by hand, and tested their work by loading pages in the browser and looking at them. The entire toolchain was about three years old and entirely novel: no patterns existed for how to organise a website, what a web server configuration should look like, or how pages should relate to each other.

  • NCSA Mosaic + early browsers (HTML tables, inline images, 1993)

    NCSA Mosaic, released in January 1993 by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina at the University of Illinois, was the first browser to display images inline with text. Its April 1993 source-code release made the web accessible on Windows and Mac computers for the first time. For web developers, Mosaic changed everything: suddenly a visual medium existed, and pages needed to look good as well as function correctly. The mid-1990s saw a wave of HTML additions (tables in HTML 3.0, background colors, image maps) that allowed rudimentary visual design on the web. Developers of this era wrote HTML directly in text editors like BBEdit or Emacs and tested pages on multiple browsers whose rendering was wildly inconsistent.

    Effect on the work

    The Mosaic/Netscape era created the webmaster role: a single person responsible for building and maintaining a company's entire web presence. It was the first identifiable job description that would later be called web developer, and it attracted both technical and non-technical workers because the barrier to entry (knowing HTML) was far lower than for traditional programming.

  • JavaScript (Netscape, May 1995) + CSS (W3C, 1996)

    Brendan Eich created JavaScript in ten days in May 1995 at Netscape, originally calling it Mocha, then LiveScript, then JavaScript. It shipped in Netscape Navigator 2.0 in December 1995. For the first time, a web page could respond to user actions without reloading: form validation, dropdown menus, and simple animations became possible. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) followed from the W3C in December 1996, separating visual presentation from HTML structure. Together, JavaScript and CSS transformed web development from document-authoring into software engineering: pages were now programs, not just text files. The developer who understood both the structural HTML layer and the behavioral JavaScript layer began to emerge as a distinct specialist.

    Effect on the work

    The introduction of JavaScript began a permanent arms race in web developer skill requirements. Webmasters who knew only HTML found their work devalued by employers seeking practitioners who could build interactive experiences. JavaScript also created the first meaningful barrier to entry in web work: writing correct, cross-browser-compatible JavaScript in the mid-1990s was genuinely hard, and the developers who could do it commanded premium salaries during the dot-com boom.

  • Server-side scripting: PHP, ASP, Perl CGI (dynamic web 1999-2008)

    PHP (originally created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994 as a set of CGI scripts, released as PHP 3 in 1998) and Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASP, 1996) made it practical to build database-backed websites without being a systems programmer. A web developer could now write page logic in a scripting language embedded in HTML, query a MySQL or SQL Server database, and return personalised content to every user. The dynamic web era separated web developers into two functional roles that persist today: front-end developers (HTML/CSS/JavaScript visible to the browser) and back-end developers (server-side logic and databases). By 2003, WordPress had launched on PHP and MySQL, giving small-business clients a CMS they could administer themselves and creating a large market for developers who specialised in PHP customisation.

    Effect on the work

    Server-side scripting massively expanded the web developer job market by making e-commerce, content management, and user-account systems buildable by a solo developer or a small agency team, rather than requiring a full software engineering team. The number of web development companies in the US grew from under 1,000 in 1995 to over 30,000 by 2005.

  • AJAX + jQuery (2005-2006), version control with Git and GitHub (2005-2008)

    Jesse James Garrett coined the term AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) in February 2005 to describe the technique that Google Maps and Gmail had quietly pioneered: loading data from the server without reloading the whole page. jQuery, released in January 2006 by John Resig, gave every web developer a cross-browser JavaScript library that made DOM manipulation, AJAX calls, and animations practical without the painful cross-browser incompatibilities of raw JavaScript. By 2011, jQuery was used on more than half of all websites on the internet. Separately, Linus Torvalds created Git in April 2005 to manage the Linux kernel; GitHub launched in April 2008 as a hosting platform for Git repositories. Web development teams could now collaborate on code asynchronously, review each other's changes before merging, and roll back to any previous state. Version control ended the era of FTP uploads and "overwriting the live server with your working copy."

    Effect on the work

    AJAX and jQuery raised the median quality of interactive web applications dramatically and created the "front-end developer" as a distinct professional identity from the full-stack webmaster. GitHub transformed web development from a craft practised in isolation into a collaborative, open-source discipline: the best patterns and libraries became public goods that any developer could adopt, accelerating the pace at which practitioner standards rose.

  • Node.js + npm (2009), responsive design (2010), React and single-page apps (2013)

    Node.js, released by Ryan Dahl in May 2009, brought JavaScript to the server for the first time, enabling web developers to write both front-end and back-end code in the same language. npm (the Node Package Manager), which launched alongside Node, created a shared library ecosystem that grew to over one million published packages by 2019, dramatically accelerating how fast a developer could assemble a working application. Ethan Marcotte's 2010 article "Responsive Web Design" in A List Apart established the design pattern for sites that adapt to any screen size, a necessity as mobile devices became the primary web access point for hundreds of millions of users. React, released by Facebook in May 2013, popularised the component-based UI model and the virtual DOM, making large, stateful single-page applications (SPAs) practical. By 2015, the JavaScript ecosystem had become so extensive and fast-moving that "JavaScript fatigue" entered the developer lexicon.

    Effect on the work

    The Node/React era bifurcated the profession into specialists: a React front-end developer working with Redux and component libraries, a Node back-end developer managing REST APIs and databases, and a DevOps engineer handling Docker containers and CI/CD pipelines. Salaries rose significantly for those who mastered the new stack, but the fragmentation of tooling also created a skills-half-life problem: the specific JavaScript framework a developer mastered in 2013 might be obsolete by 2016.

  • Cloud deployment, serverless, and Jamstack (Netlify 2015, Vercel 2015, AWS Lambda 2014)

    The Jamstack architecture (JavaScript + APIs + Markup, coined by Netlify co-founder Mathias Biilmann around 2015-2016) decoupled the build process from the hosting environment and pushed deployment to the edge. Platforms like Netlify and Vercel let a web developer push code to a Git repository and have a production deployment within seconds, with global CDN distribution handled automatically. AWS Lambda (2014) made it possible to run backend logic without provisioning or managing a server. For the web developer, this stack eliminated one of the most friction-laden parts of the job (managing and paying for servers, configuring web hosts, deploying via FTP). It also created a new tier of professionals who understood cloud architecture well enough to wire together managed services (Stripe, Auth0, Supabase, Contentful) rather than building infrastructure from scratch.

    Effect on the work

    Cloud-deployment platforms simultaneously lowered the barrier to shipping a web application (no server management) and raised the value of developers who understood the full cloud services landscape. The "full-stack developer" of 2020 was expected to know not just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript but also CI/CD pipelines, edge functions, CDN configuration, and managed database services. The rise of these platforms also began the long-term substitution of self-hosted CMS installations (WordPress, Drupal) with API-driven headless architectures, reshaping the client base of the typical agency web developer.

  • AI code generation: GitHub Copilot (2021), Cursor (2023), v0/Bolt.new/Lovable (2023-2024)

    GitHub Copilot, released as a technical preview in June 2021 and generally available in June 2022, was the first AI coding tool adopted at professional scale: by the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2025, 84% of developers reported using AI coding tools, with Copilot among the most common. For web developers, the more disruptive tools arrived in 2023-2024: v0 by Vercel (October 2023), Bolt.new (October 2024), and Lovable generated complete, deployable web applications from a plain-English description in minutes. Bolt.new hit $40 million ARR within five months of launch. These tools automated the exact work that had employed the largest segment of the freelance and agency web developer workforce: small-business marketing sites, landing pages, and simple e-commerce storefronts. The AI-generation era is the first technology in the web development timeline to directly reduce demand for the occupation rather than augmenting practitioner productivity.

    Effect on the work

    BLS OEWS data shows web developer employment declining from 112,820 (2013) to 78,860 (2024), a contraction. The strongest drivers are AI site generators automating the boilerplate-website segment plus the reclassification of many practitioners into the Software Developers category (15-1252) as their work expanded. Despite falling headcount, median wages rose to $90,930 in 2024, indicating that the remaining workforce is concentrated in higher-value specialist work.

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Web Developers employment and pay by year

On record since1991
Latest US employment70,190 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Latest US median pay$92,650 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Outlook+3.8% by 2035Source: BLS Employment Projections 2025-35Official statisticReport an error

In other countries

The latest figure each country's statistics agency publishes for this job. Each uses its own occupation definition, survey basis and currency, so the numbers are not directly comparable with each other or with the US figures.

  • Canada (NOC 21234)

    Employment, 2020
    49,965, Statistics Canada Census 2021 Official statistic Report an errorStatistics Canada Census of Population 2021: number of persons with employment income in NOC 21234 Web developers and programmers, Canada, reference year 2020. A recipients basis (anyone with employment income during the year), slightly broader than a point-in-time employed count. Statistics Canada Open Licence.
    Median pay, 2020
    C$74,500, Statistics Canada Census 2021 Official statistic Report an errorStatistics Canada Census of Population 2021 (Table 98-10-0586): median employment income for NOC 21234 Web developers and programmers, Canada, reference year 2020, full-year full-time workers (the basis comparable to the US OEWS full-time median). Statistics Canada Open Licence.
View all 8 years of cited US data, each linked to its source
YearUS employmentAnnual pay (median unless marked)SourceReport
19955,000n/aEst., Digital Silk Researched contextReport
199975,000$40,800Est., Digital Silk (employment) Researched contextEst., CodeSubmit (pay) Researched contextReport
2013112,820n/aBLS OEWS May 2013 Official statisticReport
202184,820$77,030BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statisticReport
202288,620$78,580BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statisticReport
202385,350$84,960BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statisticReport
202478,860$90,930BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statisticReport
202570,190$92,650BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statisticReport
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