Have salaries gone down?

Have salaries gone down?

I’ve been looking for a SRE/DevOps/Cloud Engineering role for a while now, and most of the offers I’ve received are in the $160K-$170K base range. The issue is that this doesn’t really give me any increase in base salary. I have about 6-8 years of experience, and I work with Terraform, AWS, Python, CI/CD, automation, and more.

I’m aiming for a $185K+ base, but it feels tough to hit that, especially in high-cost areas like New York. How’s the market looking right now? What should I realistically be targeting? What is everyone making with similar skills?