Computer Network Support Specialists Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Computer Network Support Specialists offer sit among all 146,450 workers doing this job? The survey top-codes at $239,200+ and withholds unreliable cells, shown as n/p in the table.

Employment and concentration

With 146,450 jobs nationally, Computer Network Support Specialists make up 0.09% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: Texas alone holds 12,730 of those jobs, the top three states hold 22.8%, and the deepest concentration sits in Maryland (location quotient 3.18, where 1.00 is the national average). A quotient above 2 usually signals a local industry cluster rather than evenly spread demand.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $56,720 at the 25th percentile, $73,340 at the middle, $95,710 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $78,460, a ratio of 2.7 to 1. Where a specific job offer lands on that range says more about the role's level than the occupation's headline median does.

Pay by state

Maryland posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $99,780, and Texas the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Computer Network Support Specialists stands number 209 by employment and number 264 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Computer and Mathematical Occupations, the group median wage is $103,790 across 21 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 29% less than its group median, and it supplies 2.8% of the group's 5,192,870 jobs. In 20 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $73,340, which is the single best quick test of whether this occupation's pay is set nationally or locally: a high count means local markets regularly outbid the national figure.

Metropolitan areas: where the jobs and the pay sit

New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ is the largest metro employer with 6,620 jobs, 4.5% of the national total. Two rankings follow across the 300 metros BLS publishes for this occupation: where the jobs are, then where the money is, with the pay ranking restricted to metros employing at least 500 people in this occupation to keep small samples out of the lead.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, San Juan-Bayamon-Caguas, PR posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $50,600 a year, against $116,110 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. The lowest-paying large metro and the highest are both real markets for this occupation; the difference between them is the geography premium, or penalty, in cash terms.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median annual wage of $73,340 works out to $6,112 a month before taxes, $2,821 per biweekly paycheck, and $1,410 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($56,720) to the 75th ($95,710) is worth $38,990 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. Run the median through the paycheck calculator for a take-home estimate in your state, compare an offer against your current pay with the salary calculator, and check whether a raise actually beats prices with the raise vs inflation calculator.

To place a real offer: a salary of $80,674 would sit between the median ($73,340) and the 75th percentile ($95,710), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $56,720, is $16,620 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Computer and Mathematical Occupations

Pay for the neighboring roles in the same BLS major group: Computer User Support Specialists, Computer Systems Analysts, Computer Occupations, All Other, Network and Computer Systems Administrators, Data Scientists, Software Quality Assurance Analysts and Testers. The full directory is on the Careers hub.