Occupation / job
Computer Systems Analysts
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
$105,850 against a $50,020 national midpoint is 112% more, or $26.84 an hour. Almost nothing pays this much more without a long, expensive or restricted route in — read that route before reading the number again.
519,530 people do this work. An occupation this large has a published, well-known going rate — which means less scope to be underpaid and less scope to negotiate above it.
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.
No verified preparation time is on file for Computer Systems Analysts. The wage survey behind every figure on this page asks employers what they pay, not what they required, so the honest answer here is that we do not know.
Who should not do this
A quarter earn below $82,860 and a quarter above $134,110: a 1.6x ratio, $51,250 between the ends. That is an ordinary working spread, which also means experience and location explain most of it and there is no shortcut through the middle.
The 25th percentile is $82,860, $32,840 above the $50,020 typical American job. When even the floor is this high, the thing to investigate is the entry requirement rather than the pay.
Avoid it if you expect the qualification to hold its value; here it depreciates from the day you finish.
No failure rate is shown, and the absence is deliberate: the 519,530 figure counts people already working as Computer Systems Analysts, not everyone who trained and never got hired. Without a licensing register to divide by, a rate here would be an invented denominator.
What the spread tells you
1.6x between $82,860 and $134,110 is the ordinary shape of an occupation where experience and region both matter and neither dominates. $105,850 is a fair expectation by mid-career, not on day one.
Put in money rather than ratios: $82,860 at the 25th percentile, $105,850 at the midpoint, $134,110 at the 75th. $51,250 separates the quarter of Computer Systems Analysts at the bottom from the quarter at the top.
Between $82,860 and $134,110 — the two ends of the middle half — sits $105,850. Moving from the midpoint to the upper quarter is worth $28,260; the whole climb from the lower quarter is $51,250.
From $105,850 it is $22,990 down to the bottom quarter and $28,260 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: $39.83 at the bottom quarter, $50.88 at the midpoint, $64.47 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
Employers reported these wages for people already working as Computer Systems Analysts. The self-employed are excluded, so $105,850 does not describe an independent doing the same work.
Treat the per-hour figure as a conversion. It assumes a flat full-time year against $105,850 because we have no verified record of unpaid hours or out-of-pocket costs for this work, and we would rather convert honestly than adjust invented ones.
How this is calculated · Self-employment failure rates · What credentials cost and pay back · Look up something else