Compensation Index: IT & BFSI edition, Q2 2026

This edition is built from the offers our senior IT and BFSI mandates produced over the quarter, roles where a candidate weighed a real Recruise offer against a real alternative and chose. That's a narrower base than a market-wide survey, but it's a live one: every figure reflects a decision made this quarter, and where a closed offer and a published band disagree, the closed offer is the more current fact. The full band tables, cut by role, level and city, sit in the Compensation Index; this piece reads the two signals that moved most.

The macro backdrop is a cooling cycle, which makes the point sharper rather than softer. Aon projects India salary increases of 9.1% for 2026 and Mercer projects around 9%, two independent gold-standard surveys landing in the same place, and both down from the double-digit corrections of recent years. When the headline increment cools, the market stops competing on the annual number and starts competing on the specific seats it can't fill. That's exactly where a closed-offer read earns its keep.

Read senior IT on headline pay and it looks quiet. Most core engineering-leadership and platform roles closed within touching distance of last quarter, and the increment has cooled toward the ~9% market consensus. The movement didn't disappear, though. It moved down a level, from the band to the skill premium inside it. The Compensation Index puts the GCC premium at 25–40% over an equivalent IT-services role at mid-senior level, and the skill premium on top of that: GenAI, MLOps, cloud and security roles clear 25–50% above a generalist at the same level, while commoditised roles see only 6–8%.

That spread is the whole story of the quarter. A single published midpoint for “senior engineering” now averages two markets that have pulled apart: a scarce-skill market re-pricing fast and a generalist market barely moving. The Compensation Index edition records a 4.1-point spread between the top-paying sector and the bottom, the widest in recent years. Budget against the average and you over-pay the generalist and under-pay the exact hire you called the search for.

The 25–50% skill premium is corroborated well beyond our own data; the external supply picture points the same way. Demand for AI talent in India is projected to exceed 1.25 million by 2027, against a base of roughly 600,000–650,000 in 2022, according to the Deloitte–Nasscom report on bridging the AI talent gap, which also found only about 16% of IT professionals were AI-skilled. When demand roughly doubles and the qualified pool stays thin, the clearing price for the scarce skill moves faster than any annual survey can track.

You can see it in the postings before the bands: Naukri's JobSpeak index recorded AI/ML hiring up around 45% over the year, with the senior 20-plus-LPA band up about 16%. The aggregate labour market reinforces the squeeze: India's Net Employment Outlook was +68% for Q2 2026, the strongest since 2008, yet 82% of employers reported difficulty finding the skills they need, per the ManpowerGroup Employment Outlook Survey. Strong intent meeting thin supply is precisely the condition under which a scarce-skill premium widens while the generalist band sits still.

Read the BFSI band as an average and it looks calm. Read it by role and the calm breaks up. Risk, controls and regulated-platform leadership, the seats where a wrong hire is expensive in ways the parent can measure, carried a visible premium at the point of close. Generalist technology management didn't. The band held; its interior moved. The Compensation Index BFSI edition puts the AI-and-data skill gap at 38–42% inside BFSI GCCs, on top of a 20–40% premium these centres already pay over services for the same skill.

There's a second axis the average hides: geography. The BFSI edition records a Bangalore-to-Chennai city swing that runs up to about a quarter for the same role and level, a gap large enough that a band set in one city quietly loses candidates in another. Between the scarce seat and the city line, the number worth budgeting against is rarely the headline band. It's the specific seat, in the specific city, where scarcity and consequence overlap.

For a compensation committee, both readings resolve into one discipline. Treat the published survey as the floor, the convergence of Aon at 9.1% and Mercer at around 9% gives you a defensible base, then correct it for the two things the average hides: the skill premium inside the band and the seat inside the sector. GCC-specific increments have run hotter than the national number, with Zinnov putting average GCC increments near 9.9%, so even the floor needs a GCC adjustment before the seat-level premium goes on top.

In practice that's three standing questions before a senior band is signed off. Is this a scarce-skill seat, GenAI, MLOps, cloud, security, or in BFSI, risk, controls and regulated platforms, where the closed-offer premium runs well above the midpoint? Which city is the band set in, given a swing that reaches a quarter for the same role? And is the number a base figure or a total-package one? A committee that prices the seat rather than the band is budgeting against what candidates are actually signing this quarter. The full tables that answer those questions, by role, level and city, are in the Compensation Index.