The healthy pay packets being reported are just the latest of many indicators that Java developers are well rewarded.

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There's yet more evidence of Java developers earning six-figure salaries in new figures out today.

The US figures from developer community hub Codementor show Java developers earning an average wage of between almost $120,000 in New York down to about $98,000 in Colorado.

Those healthy pay packets are just the latest of many indicators that Java developers are being well rewarded.

Employment site Glassdoor classed Java developer as one of the 10 roles in the US that enjoyed the highest wage growth in 2018, with median pay up 4.2% year-on-year compared with a 2.3% rise for US workers during the same period. The rapid rise in pay for Java developers is also seen in the UK, where Hays recruitment ranked them among the tech workers who had seen the largest percentage increase in pay in 2018.

SEE: Hiring kit: Python developer (Tech Pro Research)

Strong demand and high job satisfaction also helped Java developer be crowned as the 22nd best job in America in an Glassdoor report earlier this year.

Here are Codementor's figures for average Java developer pay in the US.

States Average salary for Java developers New York $119,204 California $116,078 Massachusetts $115,362 Florida $104,744 Washington $99,883 Texas $98,693 Colorado $98,139

The rates for freelance Java developers are even higher, although highly variable, with average annual pay of $117,120 to $153,600, average monthly pay of $9,760 to $12,800, and average hourly pay of $61 to $80.

That said, estimates for Java developer pay differ depending on the source. Glassdoor's most recent estimate is a median salary of $88,116 per year, while the Dice Salary Survey for 2019 put the average salary for the role as $105,164, with a 2.6% YoY increase.

There's also huge variation in pay depending on the developer's experience. According to a Glassdoor breakdown of salaries for Java developers roles, pay stretches to above $100,000 annual salary for the most experienced applicants, but down to around $70,000 to $80,000 for relatively inexperienced programmers.

For those on the very first rung of their career, junior Java developer roles are generally lower paid, with wages starting closer to $50,000.

The good news for Java programmers is that two related languages, Kotlin and Scala, both of which run on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), are consistently singled out as some of the highest-paid languages around, even if demand is below that for Java.

Codementor says experienced Java developers are generally familiar with the following concepts: object-oriented programming, the Java ecosystem, concurrency and multithreading, SQL queries, data structures and collections, JVM and memory management, cache coherence and fence instructions, class loading, and how to optimize garbage collection.

Java has been the mainstay of server-side enterprise apps for more than a decade and is still one of the principal languages used to develop Android apps, helping to explain its enduring popularity.

Industry veterans recently outlined to TechRepublic why it's still worth learning Java and why demand is likely to remain strong for years to come.

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