IT Salaries by Job

What Are IT Salaries Right Now?

IT salaries depend on the job. Support work sits at the bottom of the range and management sits at the top, with a lot of overlap in between. The numbers on this page come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics OEWS survey, May 2025 release, at bls.gov/oes, and every one of them is a national median for a specific BLS occupation.

A median is the midpoint. Half the workers in the occupation earn more, and half earn less. It is not an offer, and it does not predict what you would earn in your first year. For that reason each of our job pages also shows the spread from the 10th to the 90th percentile, and you should read both numbers together.

The pages are built around ten jobs that an online IT degree commonly leads to. Each of the ten maps onto a BLS occupation. Two of them, network administrator and systems administrator, share one BLS occupation, and network engineer maps to the closest match, network architects. The page for each says so.

IT Salaries From Highest to Lowest

Each bar runs from the 10th to the 90th percentile for that job, on one shared scale that starts at zero and ends at $297,510. The mark on the bar is the median.

1. Network administrators and systems administrators share one BLS occupation, network and computer systems administrators (SOC 15-1244), so these figures are the same for both roles.
2. BLS has no separate category for network engineers, so the closest match is network architects (SOC 15-1241).

The largest gap between neighboring rows is $41,090, between IT manager and network engineer. The widest range belongs to IT manager, at $189,960 from the 10th to the 90th percentile. The fastest projected growth is for information security analyst, at +21% over 2025 to 2035.

What Explains the Gaps in IT Salaries

The gaps between these medians come from a small number of things, and it helps to know them before you pick a path.

Design and judgment pay more than upkeep. Network architects earn $134,050, while the administrators who run the networks those architects design earn $99,130. Employers pay a premium for decisions that are expensive to get wrong.

Scarcity and risk pay more than routine. Information security analysts earn $129,180 because a failure is costly and the supply of skilled people is thin. Computer user support specialists earn $61,860 because the work, while necessary, is entered by many people and increasingly handled by self-service tools.

Scope pays more than skill alone. Managers earn the highest median, $175,140, because they control teams and budgets. Their 10th percentile, $107,550, is higher than the median for support work.

Experience and employer matter within every job. The spread inside each occupation is often larger than the gap between neighboring jobs. A senior administrator at the 90th percentile earns more than a median analyst, and a new analyst at the 10th percentile earns less than a median administrator.

Which IT Salaries Are Growing

Pay and demand do not always move together, and the 2025 to 2035 projections from the BLS Employment Projections program show that clearly. Never read “IT jobs are growing” without asking which jobs.

Information security analysts are projected to change by 21% over the decade, and IT managers by 15.8%. Computer systems analysts are projected to change by 7.9%, network architects by 7.7%, web developers by 3.8% and computer network support specialists by 1.2%. Those are the occupations adding jobs.

Network and computer systems administrators are projected to change by -4.1%, and computer user support specialists by -3.5%. Database administrators are essentially flat at -0.1%. Those occupations are shrinking or holding steady, though each still has thousands of openings a year, because many workers leave or move up.

The practical conclusion is a path and not a warning. Support and administration are common starting points, and the growth is on the next steps up: engineering, analysis, security and management.

How Much a Degree Adds to IT Salaries

BLS lists entry education for each occupation. Computer user support specialists have some college, no degree listed, and every other occupation on this page lists a bachelor's degree. That matches the medians: the jobs that typically require a bachelor’s degree pay more.

A degree is not the only route into IT, and plenty of people start in support with a certification and move up. But the degree widens the choices. It keeps open the roles where pay is highest, and it makes the transition from support or administration into engineering, analysis or security easier.

If you want to compare programs, start with the best online IT bachelor’s degrees ranking. If you are weighing whether the cost is worth it, read our guide on whether an IT degree is worth it, which sets the pay figures against what programs cost.

How to Use These IT Salary Figures

Use the medians to choose a direction and the ranges to judge an offer. If you are early in your career, pay attention to the 10th percentile and the median of the job you want next, not of the job you hold. If you already work in IT, look at the next job up and at what separates the 90th percentile from the median in your own occupation.

Remember what the numbers are not. They are national, so a metro with high demand pays more and a rural area pays less. They are wages for the occupation, not for a title, so a job called “engineer” may map to a different BLS occupation. And they describe the past survey year, so treat them as a guide to range and not a promise.

Each salary page covers what moves pay inside the occupation, from experience and certifications to industry, and links to the degree rankings behind it. Start with the job you hold or the one you want.

IT Salaries by Industry and Experience

Two forces shape IT salaries inside any one job, and the national medians cannot show them directly.

The first is industry. Financial firms, insurers, healthcare systems and technology companies generally pay more for the same IT work than schools, nonprofits and local governments. The reason is cost of failure: when a bank’s systems go down, the loss is immediate, and the bank competes with other banks for the same people. Public-sector employers often pay less in salary and offer steadier hours and benefits in exchange.

The second is experience. Every occupation here has a wide spread between the 10th and 90th percentile, and the main thing that moves a person along it is years of hands-on work, ideally in progressively harder problems. IT salaries rise fastest when you take on responsibility for something the employer cannot afford to lose: the network, the backups, the security program, the budget.

Certifications play a supporting role. They help you get hired early in a career and they matter in security more than in most areas. You can see how they fit alongside a degree on our certifications pages. But no certification moves IT salaries as much as a record of having kept something important running.

IT Salaries and the Cost of Getting There

A salary only means something against what it costs to earn it. A bachelor’s degree takes about four years, and the price differs enormously from one program to the next. The IT salaries above are the return, and the cost of the program is the investment.

For that reason, our rankings show what programs cost alongside how they score, so you can compare a program to the pay in the job you want. Entry-level IT salaries are usually near the bottom of each range, and it takes a few years to reach the median, so plan for that gap when you decide how much to borrow.

If you are just starting out, the cheapest route into the field is often a support job plus a certification, with a degree taken in parallel. If you already work in IT, a degree can be what lets you move from the lower-paid jobs on this page to the higher-paid ones. Either way, work out the number before you enroll.