What you'll learn
Quick Answer
There is no independently audited source for what Indian coding bootcamp graduates actually earn — the numbers that exist come almost entirely from the bootcamps' own marketing pages, and they don't always agree with each other. Masai School, one of the few Indian bootcamps that publishes placement figures at all, has listed its average package as both ₹6.1 LPA and ₹6.9 LPA on different pages of its own website. That gap between what gets marketed and what can actually be verified is, itself, the most useful thing we found.
What “Actual Earnings” Would Actually Require
Before looking at a single number, it's worth being clear about what a trustworthy answer to “how much do bootcamp grads earn” would need: a defined cohort (not just “graduates ever”), a clear definition of “placed” (a full-time salaried offer, not an internship or a freelance gig), disclosure of what share of enrolled students that average is based on, and ideally, someone outside the bootcamp checking the math. In the US, an organization called CIRR (Council on Integrity in Results Reporting) exists specifically to standardize and audit this kind of bootcamp outcome data.
We could not find an Indian equivalent of CIRR anywhere in our research. That single fact shapes everything else in this article — in India, every number you'll see about bootcamp salaries is self-reported by the bootcamp itself, with no standard methodology and no outside check.
The Numbers Bootcamps Publish About Themselves
Masai School, a Bangalore-based bootcamp running a pay-after-placement model since 2019, is one of the more transparent players in this space — and even its own numbers don't fully agree with each other. A review published on Fueler.io found one Masai page citing a 94% placement rate and a ₹6.9 LPA average alumni salary, while a separate, current Masai application page lists the average CTC as ₹6.1 LPA. Neither page fully explains whether that average is calculated across all enrolled students or only the ones who got placed.
Other players make bigger claims with even less visible methodology. A comparison published on FindMyGuru cites a smaller bootcamp, The Skillians, claiming an average placed CTC of ₹9.3 LPA and a highest CTC of ₹47.6 LPA — the kind of single best-case number that tells you almost nothing about what a typical graduate earns. Scaler Academy separately advertises a 126% average salary increase for its graduates, a relative figure that says nothing about the base salary it's a percentage of.
None of this makes these numbers false. It makes them unverifiable — every one is generated and published by the company with the strongest incentive to make its own outcomes look good, with no outside audit in the loop.
Why Clean Numbers Are Genuinely Hard Here
There's a real structural reason placement salary data is messy in India specifically, and it shows up in Masai School's own financials. Reporting from Inc42 found that Masai's pay-after-placement model — where students pay nothing upfront and instead pay a share of their salary for 36 months after landing a job — ran into a problem the model didn't fully account for: not every student wanted the same outcome. Some joined to freelance or build their own products rather than take a full-time job. Others, especially from smaller towns, weren't open to relocating, which directly hurt their placement odds. The result, per that reporting, was a loss of ₹42.04 crore in FY24 for the company.
That matters for a salary-data article because the mismatch runs both ways: a bootcamp's revenue depends on graduates taking traditional full-time jobs, so the average salary it publishes is almost certainly skewed toward the subset of graduates who did exactly that — the freelancers, the founders, and the ones who stayed unplaced for personal reasons don't show up in that number at all.
What You Can Actually Check Yourself
Since you can't get an audited number, get better questions instead. Before enrolling anywhere, ask for cohort-specific figures — “of the students who started with your March 2025 batch, how many are included in this average?” — rather than accepting a lifetime total since the program launched. Ask what counts as “placed.” A full-time offer, a stipend-based internship, and a freelance gig booked through Upwork are three very different outcomes that often get bundled into one placement rate.
Cross-check against sources the bootcamp doesn't control. Searching for the bootcamp's name on Glassdoor, on levels.fyi, and for named alumni on LinkedIn is slower than reading a landing page, but it's the closest thing to an independent data source you'll actually get. On cost: mid-tier programs in India generally run ₹30,000 to ₹1.5 lakh, while premium programs like Scaler can run ₹3.5 to ₹4.5 lakh — know that range going in so a pay-after-placement pitch doesn't feel like the only option available to you.
The Honest Verdict
We didn't find a scandal. We found an information gap — and for a decision this expensive, the gap itself is the finding worth publishing. No Indian coding bootcamp we researched, including the ones that publish the most detail, has its numbers checked by anyone outside the company selling the course.
That doesn't mean bootcamps don't work, or that every number they publish is wrong. It means an “X LPA average” on a landing page should be read the way you'd read any other number in a sales pitch: as a starting question, not a finished answer.