IT jobs in Norway: high pay, a calmer market

Norway has long been a good country to be an IT specialist in: high pay, flexible ways of working and employers competing for skills. Most of this still holds. But the figures from 2025 and 2026 also show a market that has calmed down, where it takes more to stand out. Here are the key figures if you are looking for a job.

• NOK 79,380was the average monthly pay for ICT professionals in 2025. The average for all occupations was NOK 62,070.SSB
• 1,5 %of the labour force in engineering and ICT occupations were fully unemployed in September 2026, against 1.3 % a year earlier.Nav
• 18,1 %of Norwegian tech job ads in 2026 were in English and did not require Norwegian.Nordic Tech Jobs, job-ad analysis

Pay is well above average

According to SSB, ICT professionals earned an average of NOK 79,380 a month in 2025, against NOK 62,070 for all occupations. That is 28 per cent more. The median was NOK 75,410, against 55,800 for all occupations. The spread is wide: the middle half of ICT professionals earned between NOK 62,500 and 91,670.

The private sector pays best. ICT professionals in the private sector earned NOK 81,070 a month, against 69,390 in central government. Pay growth from 2024 to 2025 was 4.5 per cent, the same as for all occupations. Female ICT professionals earned 91.2 per cent of what men earned – a smaller gap than in working life overall, where the share was 87.9 per cent. Women make up 23.8 per cent of ICT professionals.

The salary surveys point the same way. In kode24’s survey for 2026, with 2,067 responses, developers earned an average of NOK 989,336 a year. Respondents were on average 36 years old with ten years of experience. According to Tekna, starting pay for new graduates in 2025 was NOK 667,641 in the private sector, 645,514 in the municipal sector and 606,940 in the state.

The market has slowed down

The number of IT jobs grew strongly until 2022. Since then, growth has almost stopped.

At the same time, unemployment is rising. In September 2026, 4,539 people in the engineering and ICT occupational group were fully unemployed, 1.5 per cent of the labour force. That is 13 per cent more than a year earlier, while total unemployment fell by 4 per cent. The increase covers both engineers, partly in petroleum, and ICT occupations. The level is still low.

That does not mean there are no jobs. In September 2026, 3,525 new positions were advertised in engineering and ICT occupations, 10 per cent more per working day than a year earlier. In the public sector, recruiting is still hard: of the state agencies that recruited ICT specialists in 2025, 76.1 per cent had difficulties doing so. In business the share was far lower.

Experience, security and AI are the ticket in

When employers have more applicants to choose from, they become more selective. In its report on the labour market for ICT specialists towards 2030, Samfunnsøkonomisk analyse points out that experienced experts are the hardest to find. Demand for systems architecture, data analysis and cloud is stable, while IT security and artificial intelligence are expected to grow fastest. The report also notes that more organisations are building competence in-house instead of hiring consultants.

AI is already part of everyday work: according to Nav’s employer survey, 89.9 per cent of enterprises in information and communication use artificial intelligence, against 53.2 per cent of businesses overall. In NHO’s competence barometer, 24 per cent of member companies say they need ICT competence, most often large enterprises and companies in telecom and finance.

Hybrid is the norm

Nine in ten ICT professionals work from home some of the time, according to SSB’s labour force survey for 2025, against 42.9 per cent of all employed. But the share working from home half the time or more has fallen from 42.6 per cent in 2022 to 23.3 per cent. Only 4.9 per cent work solely from home. In kode24’s survey, 72 per cent of developers work from home at least one day a week, 2.6 days on average, while 7 per cent work fully remotely. So expect hybrid as the starting point – fully remote work is the exception.

If you come from abroad

Norwegian IT is already international. In the fourth quarter of 2025, 18.7 per cent of ICT professionals were immigrants, up from 15.9 per cent in 2020. Immigrants accounted for 28 per cent of the growth in the occupation over the same period, and 43 per cent of them came to Norway to work.

Language is still a threshold. An analysis by Nordic Tech Jobs of 2,058 Norwegian tech job ads from January to September 2026 shows that 20.7 per cent were written in English, but only 18.1 per cent were in English and did not require Norwegian. 43.9 per cent explicitly asked for Norwegian, and 21 per cent mentioned security clearance, which often requires ties to Norway. Start-ups were far more open to English than other employers.

Citizens of the EU/EEA do not need a work permit, but must register. If you come from a country outside the EU/EEA, you can apply for a residence permit as a skilled worker. This requires a concrete job offer from a Norwegian employer, normally full-time, and education at vocational college or university level, or special qualifications. Pay and working conditions must be no worse than what is normal in Norway. Where there is no collective agreement, the minimum pay is NOK 545,400 a year for positions that require a bachelor’s degree, and NOK 624,700 for positions that require a master’s degree. In 2025, UDI granted 3,593 such permits, most of them to citizens of the United Kingdom, India, Ukraine and the USA.

What does this mean for you?

• Show your experience concretely. When employers are selective, technologies, projects and responsibility count for more than a job title. A structured profile makes it easier to be found for the right role.
• Build skills where demand is growing. Security, cloud, data and AI are the areas employers and the projections point to. Certifications make the competence visible.
• Learn Norwegian if you do not speak it. English is enough at many international companies and start-ups, but more than four in ten job ads ask for Norwegian.
• Consider the public sector too. Pay is lower than in the private sector, but the state still struggles to recruit ICT specialists.
• Expect hybrid. Most employers expect you to be in the office a few days a week.

Pay is high and the jobs are there, but the market is more selective than three years ago. It pays to show exactly what you can do.

About the figures

SSB’s pay figures are average monthly earnings per full-time equivalent, including agreed pay, irregular supplements and bonuses, but excluding overtime. ICT professionals are group 25 in SSB’s occupational classification, which includes most developers. Nav’s occupational group engineering and ICT also covers engineers outside IT. The figures from kode24, Tekna and NHO are surveys, and the analysis from Nordic Tech Jobs is a commercial review of job ads. The calculations of growth and shares are our own, based on SSB’s tables.