Software careers often have levels (hence the site name). Typically there's entry with 0-2.5 years, next at 2-5 years, then career level at 5-10 years. Some go above that (principal, chief, etc.). The one I'll play with here is the 5-10 year one. 5-10 year is often called 'senior software engineer'.

Here are the rough pay distributions in levels for that experience range in mid-priced cities (this is total compensation and not base salary):

A comparison is hard because it's not clear that each city represents the same thing. For example, many are state capitals so if 90% of the jobs are state ones then you'd expect them to be lower. Here's a list of the top-3 included employers for each city in that plot to hopefully provide more context:

• Pittsburgh: Google, Uber, Argo AI
  
  
• Chicago: Paypal, Expedia, Accenture
  
  
• Denver: Amazon, Deloitte, Gusto
  
  
• Austin: Apple, IBM, Amazon
  
  
• Detroit: Amazon, General Motors, Quicken Loans
  
  
• Atlanta: VMWare, Salesforce, Microsoft
  
  
• Raleigh: IBM, Cisco, Microsoft
  
  
• Nashville: Amazon, Asurion, HCA Healthcare
  
  
• Phoenix: American Express, Intel, Amazon

Amazon is everywhere apparently...

These numbers aren't perfect obviously. Many people do work for the state for example and they don't seem to be providing salaries here, so I'd wager that levels.fyi is biased towards higher-paying companies. Fun data though.