Business Insider analyzed work-visa salary data for over 5,000 roles at Meta in 2025.
Meta paid as much as $450,000 for top software engineering roles in 2025.
About half of Meta’s H-1B hires are for software engineering roles.
In 2025, Meta went on a hiring spree, paying top dollar to acquire top AI talent.
Meta paid one software engineer a base salary of $450,000a year. A research engineer earned $400,000. And a product manager took home $348,000 — all before stock options, bonuses, and other perks.
These eye-popping figures come from Business Insider’s analysis of over 5,800 federal H-1B and other work visa applications Meta filed last year, offering a rare glimpse into how the social media giant compensates its workforce.
The data included roles at Meta, including subsidiaries WhatsApp and its payments division. It shows that most of the new Meta hires earned between $150,000 and $250,000 in base salary, and the company continues to pay extraordinary premiums for specialized AI talent and senior technical roles.
About half of all positions hired through the H-1B visa program during the periodwent to software engineering roles. Software engineers at Meta can command salaries of as much as $450,000. Product designers and UX researchers routinely clear the $200,000 mark. And a vice president of AI earns a base salary of $650,000.
These figures reflect only annual base salaries. They exclude stock options, signing bonuses, and other perks that can often double or triple a total compensation package. For high-level researchers, Meta reportedly offered total packages of over $100 million.
At the end of 2025, Meta had 78,865 employees, its 10-K said.
In the last quarter of 2025, H-1B visa filings at Meta roughly halved from the same period the previous year, Business Insider reported last week.
The decline came as the Trump administration made changes in September to the work visa program that made the process more costly and subjected applicants to tighter scrutiny. And while Meta has been in hiring mode, it recently laid off workers in Reality Labs and other units.
Here’s what Meta is paying across key roles, based on work visa filings from the 2025 fiscal year.
Machine learning and AI researcher salaries
Meta Superintelligence Labs chief Alexandr Wang.
Bloomberg/Getty Images
AI Research Scientist: $163,800 to $328,000
Machine Learning Engineer: $165,000 to $250,602
Machine Learning Systems Engineer: $250,000
ML Engineer: $193,000 to $287,042
Product Manager, Machine Learning: $252,000
Product Policy Manager, GenAI: $198,000
Software Engineer, Machine Learning: $144,096 to $293,118
