Occupation / job
Computer Network Support Specialists
Median annual pay. Half earn less than this.
Hourly at a standard 2,080-hour year. We do not yet have unpaid-time or cost data for this, so this is not an adjusted figure.
The middle half. A quarter earn below this range.
Source: BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025 · view
What this figure cannot tell you
It covers people EMPLOYED in this occupation. Anyone who trained for it and was never hired is not in the median above, and neither is anyone doing the work self-employed. No verified count of qualified people exists for this occupation, so this page shows none rather than an estimate. Why that matters · The occupations where we could source it
Who this suits
Computer Network Support Specialists pays $76,220 at the midpoint, 52% above the $50,020 national figure. Premiums that size are rationed by something; find out what before the salary does your thinking for you.
With 146,190 in the occupation, Computer Network Support Specialists is a big field with a visible internal market. Big fields reward moving: the pay you can negotiate on arrival usually beats what the annual review will give you for staying.
Computing suits people who can keep learning after what they learned stops being used. The skill with the longest half-life is the habit of relearning, not any particular stack.
How long it takes to become one of the 146,190 people doing this is not something we have a source for. BLS counts and pays them; it does not record how they got there, and we would rather say so than guess.
Who should not do this
From $58,240 to $98,750 is $3,375 a month, or 1.7x bottom quarter to top. An ordinary spread like this is mostly years and geography; assume you enter near the bottom of it and that closing the gap takes a career rather than a move.
Even the bottom quarter of Computer Network Support Specialists earns $58,240 — $28.00 an hour and $8,220 clear of the $50,020 national midpoint. Very little of this distribution is badly paid.
Avoid it if you expect the qualification to hold its value; here it depreciates from the day you finish.
There is no failure rate on this page because there is nothing honest to divide by. BLS counted 146,190 people employed as Computer Network Support Specialists; it did not count the people who trained for it and are doing something else, and a rate built without that denominator would be a number we made up.
What the spread tells you
At 1.7x between $58,240 and $98,750 this is a normally shaped occupation. $76,220 is what the middle of Computer Network Support Specialists earns after the years it takes to get there, which is not the same as what it offers you now.
In cash terms the middle half of Computer Network Support Specialists runs $58,240 to $98,750 — $40,510 a year between the 25th and 75th percentiles, against a midpoint of $76,220.
Getting to $98,750, the 75th percentile, is worth $22,530 a year more than the $76,220 midpoint and $40,510 more than the $58,240 a quarter of Computer Network Support Specialists settle for.
From $76,220 it is $17,980 down to the bottom quarter and $22,530 up to the top. The upper half of the range is the longer one, which is the ordinary shape for work where experience compounds.
Converted to an hourly rate over a full-time year: $28.00 at the bottom quarter, $36.64 at the midpoint, $47.47 at the top quarter. The typical American job works out at $24.04 on the same basis.
What these figures are, and what they are not
The $76,220 figure is what employers pay employees. It is before tax and before deductions, it excludes the self-employed entirely, and it says nothing about anyone who does this work on their own account.
The hourly number on this page is $76,220 divided by a 2,080-hour year and nothing more. We hold no unpaid-hours or cost data for Computer Network Support Specialists, so it is arithmetic rather than an effective rate.
How this is calculated · Self-employment failure rates · What credentials cost and pay back · Look up something else