Information Security Analysts Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Information Security Analysts offer sit among all 179,430 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

BLS counted 179,430 Information Security Analysts jobs in May 2024, which is 0.12% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in Virginia, where the location quotient is 3.95, meaning the occupation holds 3.95 times its national share of local jobs. Virginia employs the most people outright, 18,670 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 27.4% of the national total.

One in ten workers in this field earns $69,660 or less, and one in ten earns $186,420 or more, so the top-to-bottom ratio is 2.7 to 1 and the annual gap is $116,760. The mean ($127,730) versus median ($124,910) comparison shows a right-skewed ladder where senior and specialist roles lift the average in this occupation.

Pay by state

Washington posts the highest median annual wage in the state table at $142,920, and Virginia the largest headcount. The full table, sorted by employment:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Information Security Analysts stands number 174 by employment and number 64 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 20% more than its group median, and it supplies 3.5% of the group's 5,192,870 jobs. In 17 of the 50 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $124,910, 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

Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV is the largest metro employer with 15,870 jobs, 8.8% 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, Oklahoma City, OK posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $90,430 a year, against $204,340 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: $10,409 a month before tax, $4,804 biweekly, $2,402 weekly. Moving from the 25th percentile ($92,160) to the 75th ($159,600) is worth $67,440 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 $137,401 would sit between the median ($124,910) and the 75th percentile ($159,600), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $92,160, is $32,750 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: Data Scientists, Software Quality Assurance Analysts and Testers, Computer Network Architects, Computer Network Support Specialists, Web and Digital Interface Designers, Computer Programmers. The full directory is on the Careers hub.