Key Findings
- Tech roles and tech companies offer the highest paying internships, with companies like Roblox, Uber and Salesforce leading Glassdoor’s list of highest paying internships.
- Mentions of remote work increased significantly for interns in 2020, rising 385 percent, but decreased slightly in 2021. In contrast, full and part-time employees saw a slow but steady increase each year.
- Negative mentions of remote work in intern reviews grew by 548 percent between 2019 and 2021, indicating companies may have struggled to adapt internship programs to the new normal.
Over the last two summers, interns adjusted to the new world of work brought on by the pandemic, finding opportunities amidst a volatile job market and navigating remote onboarding and workplaces. In 2022, companies are offering many attractive internship opportunities as the labor market continues to grow.
Using Glassdoor’s unique dataset of intern salaries, we highlighted the companies offering the highest-paying internships in the U.S. To compile this list, we calculated the median monthly base pay of salaries left by current or former U.S.-based interns between February 14, 2021 and February 12, 2022.
Gaming company Roblox offered the highest paying internships, with median monthly pay for interns reaching nearly $10,000. Uber and Capital One followed, both paying interns a median monthly salary of $8,333.
Tech is the most represented industry on the list, accounting for 17 out of 25 (68 percent) companies offering highly paid internships – unsurprising, considering tech is one of the highest-paid industries in the U.S. and jobs in tech consistently appear on Glassdoor’s Best Jobs in America. Finance and consulting — two other high-paying industries often hiring entry-level workers — are also well-represented on the list.
25 Highest-Paying Internships in the U.S. for 2022
The types of internships offered by these companies varied. While 60 percent of internship job titles at tech firms on our list were software engineering or development-related, a range of tech and non-tech opportunities appeared as well. These roles included technical ones, like data science and engineering, financial analysis, UX, machine learning and non-technical ones like product management, marketing and D&I specialists. In the finance industry, analysts made up just over a third of all reviews, software engineering made up another third, and the rest came from other professional-related roles. While software engineering and banking analyst internships drove much of the high median pay at these companies, many of the internship roles were still highly-compensated, with roles outside of software engineering or banking analysis offering a median monthly salary of $6,667.
Interns much more negative about remote work post-COVID
Examining over 130,000 intern reviews, we found a significant 385 percent increase in mentions of remote work from 2019 to 2020, followed by a slight decrease in 2021. In contrast, reviews left by full- and part-time employees over the same timeframe showed a steady increase each year, indicating that remote work triggered by the onset of the pandemic represented a much more salient issue for interns.
Although many workers prefer remote work, interns feel differently. Internships are often packed full of engaging activities designed to immerse interns in a real-world work environment and attract them back to the company post-graduation. But with the onset of COVID-19, many of these in-person events were suddenly no longer possible. The chart below shows the evolution of remote work discussion in reviews over the past three years.
For full- and part-time employees, after a sudden uptick in the spring of 2020, mentions of remote work in reviews slowly declined in the latter half of the year, then slowly increased in 2021. Interns showed a starkly different pattern. Though mentions picked up immediately following the onset of COVID-19 restrictions, it shot up to nearly 4 percent of all intern reviews in the summer of 2020. The summer of 2021 saw a similar rise, though less dramatic, indicating that remote internships may be more disruptive to interns’ plans during the summer than the school year (when internships are often part-time or remote anyway).
More importantly, have interns seen remote work as a perk or a loss? The chart below shows the sentiment of reviews for both interns and full- and part-time employees. Positive sentiment dropped rapidly in the summer of 2020 (June-September), as companies struggled to adjust to remote internships. That summer, 58 percent of interns mentioned remote work negatively in their reviews. 2021 summer interns were still largely disappointed in remote internship programs, with 70% of interns that mentioned remote work doing so negatively – a 39 percent increase from the same figure (50 percent) in the summer of 2019. Several cited the difficulty of communication and connection in a remote environment.
Zooming out to look at both review sentiment and frequency of mentions, it’s clear that remote work has become a major – and negative – part of interns’ experience. In the 2019 intern cohort, only 0.31 percent of review cons mentioned remote work; in 2021, this jumped up to 2.05 percent, a 548 percent increase. In contrast, the same figure in full- and part-time employees between 2019 and 2021 only increased by 44 percent.
Conclusion
Internships are an integral part of professionals’ early career experiences, helping them gain important skills, experience real office environments and get a foot in the door. This Glassdoor data shows the 25 companies with the highest-paying internships, giving insight into which companies may offer a strong start to a career. Though many of the internships at these companies are in finance or software engineering roles, we still see a diverse set of highly compensated roles.
Any intern experience over the last two years felt the impact of COVID-19. Although remote work has been positive for many regular employees, it has disrupted many interns’ experiences. As many employees return to the office, will the intern experience return to pre-2020 normality? Or will the newly hybrid work environment of so many companies create a radically different experience for the next generation of workers?
Methodology
Glassdoor’s Highest Paying Internships for 2022 identifies companies with the highest median monthly base pay for internships as reported by either current or former U.S.-based interns on Glassdoor between February 14, 2021 and February 12, 2022 (over 88,000 salaries). To be considered, companies with internship programs must have received at least 30 salary reports in U.S. dollars by U.S-based interns during the timeframe. In cases where companies have the same median monthly pay, the company with the greater number of salary reports receives higher rank.
To examine internship types from the top 25 companies, any reviews where job titles were not reported were excluded. Intern job titles were then lashed to occupational categories using a proprietary Glassdoor algorithm.
To analyze review text, we pulled the number of reviews mentioning ‘remote’, ‘remotely’, ‘wfh’, ‘working from home’, or ‘homeworking’ from interns posting in one of three cohort years: 2019 (February 14, 2019 to February 13, 2020), 2020 (February 14, 2020 to February 13, 2021) and 2021 (February 14, 2021 to February 13, 2022). We compared this to the number of reviews mentioning the same group of words from full-and part-time employees posting over the same time frames. Negative review sentiment refers to the number of mentions in the cons section of Glassdoor reviews divided by mentions in either pros or cons. Significance refers to statistical significance (p < 0.05) calculated using a 2-sided 2-sample test.
