Database Administrators

$104,620 against a $50,020 national midpoint is 109% more, or $26.25 an hour. Almost nothing pays this much more without a long, expensive or restricted route in — read that route before reading the number again.

Employment stands at 69,990. Database Administrators is common enough to be recruited for continuously and specific enough that the experience travels — the combination that makes changing employer a working pay rise.

This work suits people who enjoy the debugging more than the building, because most of a career here is spent understanding systems somebody else already wrote.

We carry no verified training length for Database Administrators — BLS reports pay, not preparation, and we will not estimate it.

The quarters sit at $79,610 and $135,460 — 1.7x, or $4,654 a month apart. At that width the occupation contains genuinely different jobs, and which one you are being offered matters more than the title does.

The 25th percentile is $79,610, $29,590 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.

There is no failure rate on this page because there is nothing honest to divide by. BLS counted 69,990 people employed as Database Administrators; 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.

At 1.7x, the distribution for Database Administrators is open enough that specialisation starts to pay. The distance from $79,610 to $135,460 is mostly what you can do that others in the same title cannot.

The middle half of this field earns between $79,610 and $135,460. That is $55,850 of range, with $104,620 sitting inside it as the point half the field is above and half below.

Getting to $135,460, the 75th percentile, is worth $30,840 a year more than the $104,620 midpoint and $55,850 more than the $79,610 a quarter of Database Administrators settle for.

The climb from $104,620 to $135,460 is $30,840; the drop to $79,610 is $25,010. A little more room above the midpoint than below it is the normal shape for Database Administrators and for most paid work, and it is the reason the median is the honest summary rather than the average.

Per hour at a standard full-time year that is $50.29 at the midpoint for Database Administrators, $38.27 at the 25th percentile and $65.12 at the 75th, against $24.04 for the typical American job.