Data Scientists Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Read the ladder vertically: each row is the wage of the Data Scientists worker at that point in the distribution, so $155,810 at the 75th percentile means three quarters of the occupation earns less. Figures BLS cannot publish appear as n/p, and its top code prints as $239,200+.

Employment and concentration

BLS counted 233,440 Data Scientists jobs in May 2024, which is 0.15% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in District of Columbia, where the location quotient is 3.33, meaning the occupation holds 3.33 times its national share of local jobs. California employs the most people outright, 36,850 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 34.4% of the national total.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $82,630 at the 25th percentile, $112,590 at the middle, $155,810 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $130,760, a ratio of 3.1 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

The state spread for Data Scientists runs from the $158,760 median in Washington down through every other publishing state. Employment concentrates in California (36,850 jobs). The complete table:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Data Scientists stands number 143 by employment and number 80 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 8% more than its group median, and it supplies 4.5% of the group's 5,192,870 jobs. In 15 of the 50 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $112,590, 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 19,810 jobs, 8.5% 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, Baton Rouge, LA posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $71,860 a year, against $225,590 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

The median annual wage of $112,590 works out to $9,382 a month before taxes, $4,330 per biweekly paycheck, and $2,165 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($82,630) to the 75th ($155,810) is worth $73,180 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 $123,849 would sit between the median ($112,590) and the 75th percentile ($155,810), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $82,630, is $29,960 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

Compare the ladder above with the closest relatives in the survey: Computer Network Architects, Computer Network Support Specialists, Web and Digital Interface Designers, Computer Programmers, Operations Research Analysts, Web Developers. The Careers hub carries the whole branch, group by group.