Computer Systems Analysts Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Computer Systems Analysts offer sit among all 497,800 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

May 2024 employment stood at 497,800, or 0.32% of the U.S. total. California leads the state table with 55,460 jobs; the top three states sum to 28.0% of the occupation. The concentration measure tells the more interesting story: Delaware posts a location quotient of 1.91, so a worker there is far more likely to meet a colleague in this field than the national pattern suggests.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $166,030, which is 2.6 times the $63,160 at the 10th, a difference of $102,870 annually. Because the mean wage ($111,960) sits above the median ($103,790), a typical offer should be judged against the median and the 25th to 75th percentile band, not the mean.

Pay by state

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 51 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is California at $127,660; the jobs leader is California:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Computer Systems Analysts stands number 69 by employment and number 104 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 0% more than its group median, and it supplies 9.6% of the group's 5,192,870 jobs. In 15 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $103,790, 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 25,320 jobs, 5.1% of the national total. The first table ranks metros by employment; the second ranks them by mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs in the occupation, because a three-person metro can top a pay table by accident.

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, $61,050 a year, against $161,480 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. A gap that size between two metro labor markets is why the same occupation title can fund two very different budgets in two different cities.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

Budget arithmetic on the median: $8,649 a month before tax, $3,992 biweekly, $1,996 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($80,900) to the 75th ($132,360) is worth $51,460 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. To turn any of these gross figures into spendable money, run them through the paycheck calculator; to weigh an offer against your current role, use the salary calculator; to test a raise against prices, the raise vs inflation calculator.

To place a real offer: a salary of $114,169 would sit between the median ($103,790) and the 75th percentile ($132,360), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $80,900, is $22,890 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

Sibling occupations in Computer and Mathematical Occupations: Data Scientists, Software Quality Assurance Analysts and Testers, Information Security Analysts, Computer Network Architects, Computer Network Support Specialists, Web and Digital Interface Designers. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.