Network Administrator Salary

What Is the Network Administrator Salary?

The Bureau of Labor Statistics does not publish a figure for “network administrator” alone. It groups the job with systems administrators under one code, 15-1244, Network and Computer Systems Administrators, and every figure on this page comes from that code. The same figures appear on our systems administrator salary page because the two jobs share one BLS occupation. They are not two separate surveys.

The national median is $99,130 a year, which works out to $47.66 an hour for a full-time worker. A median is the midpoint, so half of the roughly 314,340 people in the occupation earn more and half earn less. It is not an offer, and you should not expect to start there.

The numbers come from the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey, May 2025 release, published at bls.gov/oes. The Occupational Outlook Handbook has a profile of the occupation if you want the official description of the work.

Network Administrator Salary Range From the 10th to the 90th Percentile

The median hides the part most people care about, which is how far pay spreads in either direction. At the 10th percentile of that combined occupation, pay is $62,640. At the 90th percentile, the figure is $155,050. That is a wide spread, and it tells you the title alone does not set your pay.

The bottom of the range is where people starting out land, often at small businesses, schools, local governments and managed service providers where one person looks after everything from the switches to the printers. The top of the range belongs to administrators who run large, complicated networks, carry on-call responsibility for systems that cost the company money when they go down, or work in regions with high wages and heavy competition for talent.

If you are choosing between offers, compare them to this range and not just the median. An offer near the 10th percentile is an entry-level number. An offer near the median says the employer expects you to work without supervision.

What Moves Network Administrator Pay

Three things explain most of the difference between pay of $62,640 and pay of $155,050 in this occupation.

Experience. Years on the job are the largest single factor. Someone who has rebuilt a network after an outage, migrated a company to a new firewall or moved a site to a cloud provider has stories that a hiring manager will pay for. Your first two years go to learning how real networks fail. Years three through six are when you take ownership of a segment and your pay catches up to the median.

Certifications. A certification is a way to prove a skill you have not yet had a chance to demonstrate. Early on, the CCNA and CompTIA Network+ help you get past resume filters. Later, specialist credentials in security or cloud networking separate you from administrators who only know the basics. Certifications rarely add pay by themselves, but they often decide whether you get the interview.

Industry. The same skills pay differently depending on who employs you. Finance, insurance and technology companies generally pay more for network work than schools, nonprofits and local government, because an outage costs them more and they compete with each other for the same people. Public-sector jobs tend to pay less in salary and make some of it back in benefits and stability.

Location matters too. Network administrators in large metros with many employers earn more than those in small markets, though the cost of living eats part of that difference.

Network Administrator Salary by Experience

BLS does not split this occupation by years of experience, so there is no official number for “five-year network administrator.” What you can say from the spread is how people move through it.

You start near the bottom of the range, usually after a stint on a help desk or in a network support role. Help desk pay is the usual first step. After a few years of running a network yourself, you reach the middle of the range. Reaching the top usually means a change of kind and not only of degree: you design networks instead of maintaining them, you cover security, or you lead a team.

That is why the network engineer salary page sits well above this one. Engineers and architects design what administrators keep running, and employers pay for the design work.

The Network Administrator Salary Outlook

BLS projects employment in this occupation to change by -4.1% between 2025 and 2035. The occupation is not expected to grow. Automation and cloud services take over routine tasks such as provisioning and patching, so fewer people are needed to run the same amount of infrastructure.

That is not the whole picture. BLS still expects about 13,400 openings a year, because an occupation with 314,340 workers loses many people to retirement and career changes. The work does not disappear, but it changes shape. Administrators who add cloud, scripting and security skills stay in demand, and those who only do manual configuration face a shrinking pool of jobs.

Projections come from the BLS Employment Projections program. They describe the whole occupation and not any single employer or city, so a strong local market can look very different from the national number.

The Degree Behind a Network Administrator Salary

BLS lists a bachelor's degree as the typical entry-level education for network and computer systems administrators. In practice, the door is wider than that. Many administrators started on a help desk, earned an associate degree or a few certifications while working, and moved up on experience.

A degree matters most for two reasons. It makes the first job easier to land, and it keeps the path to engineering, architecture and management open later. Employers who screen for a bachelor’s will not look at a resume without one, and that tends to be the employers who pay near the top of the range.

If you are comparing programs, start with our ranking of online network administration degrees, which covers associate, bachelor’s and master’s options. Programs in that ranking run from certificate-aligned associate degrees to master’s degrees, and prices differ a great deal. The cost of those programs varies a lot, so check what a degree costs against the pay range above before you commit.

How to Raise Your Network Administrator Salary

The fastest increases come from changing what you are responsible for. Take the work nobody else wants, such as the firewall migration or the wireless survey, and write down the result. Move from supporting a network to owning one.

Learn to script. An administrator who can automate a configuration change across forty switches is worth more than one who logs into each by hand, and the difference shows up in pay. Learn the basics of a major cloud provider’s networking, because that is where the work is moving.

Finally, be willing to change employers. People who stay in one job for ten years often fall behind the market, and a move after two or three years is the most reliable way to close that gap.

For the day-to-day details of the work, read the network administrator career guide.

Network Administrator Salary Compared with Related Jobs

Network administrators sit in the middle of the IT pay ladder. Computer user support specialists, the group that includes help desk technicians, earn a median of $61,860. Computer network architects, the closest BLS match for network engineers, earn a median of $134,050. Network and systems administrators, at a shared median of $99,130, are positioned between the two, and that placement describes the career path as well as the pay.

You can read the gap in both directions. Moving up from administration into architecture means taking on design, planning and larger budgets, and the median rises accordingly. Moving down the ladder is rare, but the skills carry over: an administrator who gets tired of on-call weeks can often move into a systems analyst or project role without a pay cut.

When you compare jobs, compare the whole range and not only the middle. An administrator at the 90th percentile of the combined occupation, earning $155,050, earns more than the $134,050 median for a network architect. Individual skill, scope and employer count for more than the job title.

Network Administrator Salary by State

Maryland pays network administrators the most, with a median of $118,290, 19% above the $99,130 national figure. Puerto Rico is the lowest of the 52 places BLS reports, at $54,200. Maryland stays first after adjusting for local prices, at $112,701 in buying power.

The 10 highest of 52. These figures are for network and computer systems administrators. The adjusted column divides the median by the BEA 2024 regional price parity for the state: an estimate of buying power, not what an employer pays.

Network Administrator Salary in Major Metros

Of the 50 metro areas in our city guides with a published figure, San Jose has the highest median at $133,360, and Pittsburgh has the lowest at $80,440. A metro median covers the whole area, suburbs included, so it can differ from pay in the city itself.

The 10 highest of 50. These figures are for network and computer systems administrators, BLS May 2025.

IT Salaries Side by Side

Network and Computer Systems Administrators rank 6 of 9 by median pay among the IT occupations we cover. The low and high ends show how much overlap there is: a strong earner in a lower-paid job can out-earn a new hire in a higher-paid one.

Sorted by median pay. BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025, and Employment Projections, 2025-35.