Do bilingual employees get paid more? What published research and pay policies show

What research says about the bilingual wage premium

Saiz and Zoido, writing in the Review of Economics and Statistics 87(3):523–538 (2005), found a 2%–3% wage premium for US college graduates who can speak a second language [1].

“Premium” here means compared with otherwise similar workers: people with comparable education and other characteristics who don’t speak a second language. It is an average across the study’s sample, not a raise anyone is promised.

Bilingual pay differentials: published examples

Some public employers publish a fixed extra amount for bilingual positions.

• California state jobs (CalHR Pay Differential 14, rev. 10/14/25) [2]: $100 a month for bargaining units 08, 12 and 13 ($.58 an hour, $4.62 a day); $125 a month for California Highway Patrol unit 05 ($0.72 an hour, $5.76 a day); $200 a month for most other units ($1.15 an hour, $9.23 a day).
• California Unit 9 (PECG MOU, Article 3.4) [3]: the bilingual skill must be used on a continuing basis averaging 10% of the time, and the position or employee must be certified.
• City of Portland [4]: an additional $1.00 per hour, paid only on hours worked, for designated public-facing and customer-service classifications. It requires a verbal proficiency test, and employees retest at their three-year anniversary.

The takeaway: differentials are usually tied to a designated position plus a test, not to listing a language on a résumé.

How much do employers ask for bilingual skills?

New American Economy’s 2017 report, published by the American Immigration Council, looked at US job postings. All figures below are 2015 data [5].

• Job postings aimed at bilingual workers went from roughly 240,000 in 2010 to about 630,000 in 2015.
• 60% of the jobs with the highest demand for bilingual workers were open to people with less than a bachelor’s degree.
• Ads listing Spanish or Arabic rose about 150%, and ads for Chinese speakers more than tripled.
• California had 12.4% of the US working-age population but 19.4% of bilingual job ads.
• More than a third of the positions Bank of America advertised in 2015 were for bilingual workers.

This measures demand, not pay. It doesn’t say what those jobs paid.

When language is the job: interpreters and translators

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics reports a median pay of $60,170 for interpreters and translators (May 2025), compared with $50,980 for all occupations. The occupation had 73,900 jobs, about 6,000 openings a year, and is projected to grow 2% from 2025 to 2035 [6].

That is a different job from bilingual support or VA work. It isn’t a “bilingual premium”: interpreting and translating is the whole job, usually with its own training and credentials.

What about virtual assistants and BPO roles?

We found no official published data on bilingual pay for freelance VAs or for Philippine BPO roles.

For context only: the Philippine IT-BPM industry reported about US$40 billion in revenue and 1.9 million jobs in 2025 (IBPAP, as reported by The Manila Times) [9]. In the US, there were 65.2 million Hispanic residents in 2023 [7], and Spanish accounted for 61.1% of people who spoke a language other than English at home (ACS 2018–2022) [8]. None of these figures is a pay rate.

How to find out whether a job pays for Spanish

• Look for “bilingual differential” or “language pay” in the job posting or the union MOU.
• Ask whether a proficiency test is required.
• Ask whether it’s paid per hour, per month or only on hours worked.
• Ask what share of the job uses Spanish.
• Ask whether the certification must be renewed.

Pay depends on employer, role and location.

Where Soltura fits

Soltura is a speaking-first iPhone app for practical work Spanish, coming soon to iPhone. Start with Spanish for virtual assistants, read why virtual assistants should learn Spanish, or go to the Soltura home page.