Information Security Analysts

The $129,180 midpoint is $6,596 a month above the $50,020 typical American job, which puts Information Security Analysts near the ceiling of published federal wage data. Everything at this level is gated, and the gate is usually years long.

190,650 people are employed as Information Security Analysts. At that size there is a real ladder and enough churn that experience can be sold to a competitor rather than only accumulated where you are.

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.

How long it takes to become one of the 190,650 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 $97,810 and a quarter above $163,500: a 1.7x ratio, $65,690 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 $97,810, $47,790 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 190,650 figure counts people already working as Information Security Analysts, not everyone who trained and never got hired. Without a licensing register to divide by, a rate here would be an invented denominator.

At 1.7x between $97,810 and $163,500 this is a normally shaped occupation. $129,180 is what the middle of Information Security Analysts earns after the years it takes to get there, which is not the same as what it offers you now.

Put in money rather than ratios: $97,810 at the 25th percentile, $129,180 at the midpoint, $163,500 at the 75th. $65,690 separates the quarter of Information Security Analysts at the bottom from the quarter at the top.

Between $97,810 and $163,500 — the two ends of the middle half — sits $129,180. Moving from the midpoint to the upper quarter is worth $34,320; the whole climb from the lower quarter is $65,690.

$31,370 down to $97,810, $34,320 up to $163,500: the midpoint of Information Security Analysts is centred in its own middle half. That symmetry is why the median and the average would say much the same thing here, which is not true of most pages on this site.

Converted to an hourly rate over a full-time year: $47.02 at the bottom quarter, $62.10 at the midpoint, $78.60 at the top quarter. The typical American job works out at $24.04 on the same basis.