Database Architects

At $139,500 — $89,480 a year clear of the $50,020 all-occupation midpoint — Database Architects sits at the top of what BLS publishes. Read the gate before the figure: at this level there is always one, and it is usually measured in years.

Employment stands at 67,140. Database Architects 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.

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 67,140 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.

A quarter earn below $109,370 and a quarter above $169,290: a 1.5x ratio, $59,920 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 $109,370, $59,350 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 want a skill set that stays valuable without maintenance — this is the field where standing still is fastest punished.

There is no failure rate on this page because there is nothing honest to divide by. BLS counted 67,140 people employed as Database Architects; 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 1.5x between $109,370 and $169,290 this is a normally shaped occupation. $139,500 is what the middle of Database Architects earns after the years it takes to get there, which is not the same as what it offers you now.

The middle half of this field earns between $109,370 and $169,290. That is $59,920 of range, with $139,500 sitting inside it as the point half the field is above and half below.

Between $109,370 and $169,290 — the two ends of the middle half — sits $139,500. Moving from the midpoint to the upper quarter is worth $29,790; the whole climb from the lower quarter is $59,920.

$139,500 sits almost exactly in the middle of its own range — $30,130 above the bottom quarter, $29,790 below the top one. A symmetric distribution like this is the case where the median genuinely does describe the typical person.

Converted to an hourly rate over a full-time year: $52.58 at the bottom quarter, $67.06 at the midpoint, $81.38 at the top quarter. The typical American job works out at $24.04 on the same basis.