Database Administrators
What the pay figures show
- Utah comes first for database administrators on every measure. $135,750 on paper. Still first after tax. Still first at $103,167 once you adjust for what things cost. When the headline and the reality agree, say so plainly.
- For database administrators, Utah's $135,750 median is the highest nominally, after tax, and after regional price adjustment, at $103,167. Concordance across all three measures is uncommon and worth stating explicitly, because the absence of a reordering is itself the finding for this occupation.
Compare this career across states
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Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$104,620
People doing it
69,990
Highest paid
$135,750
UT
Best off, really
$103,167
UT, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$60,230
Highest tenth
$163,320
Lowest, really
$56,632
ME
States with data
51
National average
$110,090
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
95%
UT, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Where you do this job matters enormously. The best state pays roughly twice what the worst does. Prices alone cannot explain a gap that size. Level everything out and the range still runs $56,632 to $103,167.
- Just 69,990 Americans work in this job. Small fields move around more from year to year.
- Every state reports this one. All 51 jurisdictions publish a figure, and the middle wage is $104,620, so the comparison above leaves nobody out.
- Geographic dispersion in database administrators is unusually wide: the top state's median is approximately double the bottom's, a spread that price differentials cannot account for. The real-terms range, after tax and price deflation, still runs $56,632 to $103,167 — so the variation reflects genuine differences in local labor markets rather than a nominal illusion.
- 69,990 are employed nationally in database administrators — a small occupation, where the state spread above is more sensitive to sample composition than it would be in a large one.
- All 51 jurisdictions publish an occupational median for database administrators, so the spread described above is a complete national range rather than a range across a reported subset.
Pay band: Database Administrators
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $60,230 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $104,620 |
| Top tenth earn over | $163,320 |
| This salary | $104,620 |
Positions between the published tenth, quarter, half, three-quarter and ninetieth points are estimated by straight line.
Where these numbers come from
| BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS), May 2025 estimates, time-series bulk download (oe.data.0.Current) | as of 2025-05-01 |
|---|
Steps in Database Administrators
The national median for this job
$104,620around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $60,230 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $104,620 |
| Top tenth | $163,320 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Database Administrators, state by state
The national median for this job
51states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Maine · $70,500 |
|---|---|
| Highest | Utah · $135,750 |
| Spread | $65,250 |
One dot per state that publishes this job. A missing state means suppressed data, not zero pay.
Best paid, and best off
The national median for this job
| Texas pays | $114,400 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $117,726 |
Median pay against the same pay once BEA price parities are applied.
Every state, three ways
Sorted by what the money is actually worth. "Kept" is take-home for a single filer after federal, FICA and state income tax. "Really worth" divides that by the state's own price level, so a dollar in each row buys the same thing. Tap a state to put your own salary into it. States BLS does not publish for this job are absent — that means no published figure, not no work.
| State | Median pay | Kept after tax | Really worth |
|---|---|---|---|
| UT | $135,750 | $98,010 | $103,167 |
| TN | $115,500 | $90,084 | $97,373 |
| TX | $114,400 | $89,310 | $91,907 |
| NC | $113,900 | $84,923 | $90,210 |
| NV | $109,670 | $85,983 | $88,660 |
| MD | $124,300 | $90,560 | $87,106 |
| IA | $101,210 | $76,797 | $86,515 |
| CO | $118,340 | $87,584 | $86,390 |
| MA | $129,300 | $93,498 | $86,381 |
| LA | $98,270 | $75,401 | $85,348 |
| WA | $118,140 | $91,941 | $84,690 |
| NJ | $125,860 | $91,464 | $84,002 |
| AK | $108,810 | $85,378 | $83,938 |
| NE | $100,020 | $75,347 | $83,370 |
| NM | $98,450 | $74,596 | $82,531 |
| MO | $100,270 | $75,595 | $82,381 |
| KS | $100,170 | $73,999 | $82,253 |
| OH | $97,190 | $75,247 | $81,957 |
| GA | $106,810 | $79,240 | $81,945 |
| OK | $95,320 | $72,099 | $81,665 |
| WI | $100,020 | $74,711 | $80,251 |
| VT | $104,230 | $77,387 | $80,082 |
| MI | $99,830 | $75,068 | $79,704 |
| FL | $104,120 | $82,078 | $79,340 |
| AZ | $104,280 | $79,986 | $79,112 |
| AL | $93,900 | $70,950 | $78,860 |
| RI | $106,020 | $79,732 | $78,621 |
| IL | $104,650 | $77,416 | $78,313 |
| PA | $100,110 | $76,184 | $78,137 |
| MS | $87,790 | $67,171 | $76,949 |
| CT | $108,270 | $79,752 | $76,914 |
| DC | $118,540 | $85,115 | $76,816 |
| SC | $93,640 | $70,813 | $75,998 |
| SD | $82,540 | $66,897 | $75,937 |
| MN | $100,700 | $74,348 | $75,544 |
| IN | $90,090 | $69,580 | $75,480 |
| DE | $100,910 | $74,391 | $74,951 |
| KY | $87,390 | $67,368 | $74,466 |
| AR | $82,480 | $64,262 | $74,284 |
| WY | $82,480 | $66,855 | $73,590 |
| CA | $113,060 | $81,945 | $72,788 |
| NY | $105,900 | $78,123 | $72,587 |
| ND | $78,730 | $63,941 | $72,190 |
| ID | $85,660 | $65,405 | $71,540 |
| MT | $83,120 | $63,970 | $70,885 |
| NH | $92,110 | $73,629 | $69,894 |
| VA | $93,320 | $69,875 | $69,356 |
| OR | $100,260 | $71,140 | $67,933 |
| WV | $73,490 | $58,053 | $64,668 |
| HI | $85,500 | $63,924 | $58,857 |
| ME | $70,500 | $54,988 | $56,632 |
Sources and assumptions
- Treat the numbers for database administrators as a midpoint, not a promise. The national middle is $104,620, which means half of everyone doing this work earns less than that. Where you land depends on how long you have done it, who you do it for, and which city you do it in.
- Take-home figures for database administrators assume one person filing alone, with no dependants and nothing going into a pension before tax. Any of those lowers the tax and raises what you keep, so treat these as the plain case rather than your case. Local city income taxes are not included either, and in a few states those matter. In Utah, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $98,010.
- Levelling out prices for database administrators is done with one number per state, which is a simplification. Living costs inside a state vary a lot between its cities and its countryside. The comparison shows which way the ranking moves, not an exact figure for any address — Maine sits at the bottom on $56,632.
- These are distribution medians for database administrators, with a national value of $104,620. They describe a midpoint rather than an expected offer, and the within-occupation spread — visible in the tenth and ninetieth percentile figures — is wide enough that a state-level median is a weak predictor for any individual worker.
- Take-home calculations for database administrators assume a single filer with no dependants, the standard deduction, and no pre-tax retirement or HSA contributions. Each omitted item reduces taxable income, so the figures function as a lower bound on retained pay for this household shape; the highest such figure is $98,010, in Utah. Municipal and school-district income taxes are excluded, which understates the burden materially in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland and parts of a few other states.
- The price deflation applied to database administrators uses state-level parities. Within-state dispersion in price level, concentrated in housing, is large enough that a state figure describes no particular locality well; the bottom of this occupation's real range is Maine at $56,632. The comparison establishes the direction and rough magnitude of the reordering rather than an address-level result — Maine anchors the bottom at $56,632 — and the two source series are dated independently.