Occupation / job
Network and Computer Systems Administrators
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
$99,130 against a $50,020 national midpoint is 98% more, or $23.61 an hour. Almost nothing pays this much more without a long, expensive or restricted route in — read that route before reading the number again.
314,340 people work as Network and Computer Systems Administrators — large enough that the occupation is always hiring somewhere and always losing people somewhere else. Constant demand is security; it is rarely leverage.
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 Network and Computer Systems Administrators. 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
$78,010 to $126,640 — 1.6x, or $4,052 a month between the quarters. An unremarkable spread, which means the useful planning number for Network and Computer Systems Administrators is the bottom of it rather than the middle.
The 25th percentile is $78,010, $27,990 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 314,340 figure counts people already working as Network and Computer Systems Administrators, 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 $78,010 and $126,640 is the ordinary shape of an occupation where experience and region both matter and neither dominates. $99,130 is a fair expectation by mid-career, not on day one.
The middle half of this field earns between $78,010 and $126,640. That is $48,630 of range, with $99,130 sitting inside it as the point half the field is above and half below.
Getting to $126,640, the 75th percentile, is worth $27,510 a year more than the $99,130 midpoint and $48,630 more than the $78,010 a quarter of Network and Computer Systems Administrators settle for.
From $99,130 it is $21,120 down to the bottom quarter and $27,510 up to the top. The upper half of the range is the longer one, which is the ordinary shape for work where experience compounds.
Per hour at a standard full-time year that is $47.65 at the midpoint for Network and Computer Systems Administrators, $37.50 at the 25th percentile and $60.88 at the 75th, against $24.04 for the typical American job.
What these figures are, and what they are not
The $99,130 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 $99,130 divided by a 2,080-hour year and nothing more. We hold no unpaid-hours or cost data for Network and Computer Systems Administrators, 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