Information Security Analysts
What the pay figures show
- Washington comes first for this job on every measure. $154,940 on paper. Still first after tax. Still first at $107,927 once you adjust for what things cost. When the headline and the reality agree, say so plainly.
- For information security analysts, Washington's $154,940 median is the highest nominally, after tax, and after regional price adjustment, at $107,927. 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
$129,180
People doing it
190,650
Highest paid
$154,940
WA
Best off, really
$107,927
WA, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$75,090
Highest tenth
$199,850
Lowest, really
$70,046
MT
States with data
48
National average
$132,510
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
108.56%
WA, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Pay for this job is fairly steady around the country. Count tax and local prices and the states bunch closer still, from $70,046 to $107,927. For work like this, where you live changes your life more than it changes your pay.
- About 190,650 Americans work in this job, on a middle wage of $129,180. Big enough that where you live changes the arithmetic.
- This job is not published everywhere — 48 jurisdictions have a figure, with $129,180 in the middle. Where one is missing, it was never released. Washington tops the ones that are.
- Geographic dispersion in information security analysts is moderate by national standards. Tax and price adjustment compress the distribution further, to a real range of $70,046 through $107,927. Where nominal spread is this contained, relocation decisions in the occupation turn on non-wage factors, because the wage differential does not survive the adjustments in a form large enough to drive them.
- With 190,650 workers, information security analysts sits in the middle of the BLS headcount distribution. The state-level spread described above therefore applies to a meaningful population rather than a niche one.
- 48 jurisdictions carry a published median for information security analysts. ⚠️ Suppression is not random: it correlates with small state-level samples, so the reported set skews toward larger employers of this occupation.
Pay band: Information Security Analysts
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $75,090 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $129,180 |
| Top tenth earn over | $199,850 |
| This salary | $129,180 |
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 Information Security Analysts
The national median for this job
$129,180around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $75,090 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $129,180 |
| Top tenth | $199,850 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Information Security Analysts, state by state
The national median for this job
48states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Montana · $81,950 |
|---|---|
| Highest | Washington · $154,940 |
| Spread | $72,990 |
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 | $129,890 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $133,666 |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| WA | $154,940 | $117,167 | $107,927 |
| NM | $130,070 | $95,126 | $105,245 |
| SD | $116,640 | $90,886 | $103,168 |
| TX | $129,890 | $100,046 | $102,954 |
| NC | $131,540 | $96,434 | $102,438 |
| IA | $119,710 | $89,109 | $100,385 |
| AL | $122,730 | $90,090 | $100,133 |
| DE | $137,030 | $97,113 | $97,844 |
| TN | $115,430 | $90,035 | $97,319 |
| CO | $135,220 | $98,448 | $97,106 |
| GA | $128,970 | $93,580 | $96,775 |
| MD | $139,640 | $100,212 | $96,390 |
| VA | $134,900 | $96,474 | $95,757 |
| MN | $130,710 | $93,179 | $94,677 |
| ND | $107,540 | $83,647 | $94,439 |
| FL | $124,860 | $96,608 | $93,384 |
| AZ | $125,260 | $94,152 | $93,123 |
| OH | $110,480 | $84,231 | $91,743 |
| IL | $124,180 | $90,141 | $91,185 |
| NH | $124,000 | $96,020 | $91,148 |
| MA | $136,550 | $98,090 | $90,625 |
| CT | $130,570 | $93,926 | $90,585 |
| AR | $103,490 | $78,265 | $90,471 |
| PA | $117,770 | $88,066 | $90,324 |
| NY | $134,660 | $96,094 | $89,286 |
| NJ | $134,820 | $97,017 | $89,102 |
| AK | $114,990 | $89,725 | $88,213 |
| KY | $103,630 | $78,224 | $86,466 |
| CA | $138,570 | $97,184 | $86,323 |
| WY | $98,710 | $78,272 | $86,158 |
| NV | $106,200 | $83,542 | $86,143 |
| DC | $135,090 | $95,086 | $85,814 |
| MO | $103,440 | $77,676 | $84,649 |
| SC | $105,800 | $78,714 | $84,478 |
| MI | $106,230 | $79,299 | $84,196 |
| IN | $101,420 | $77,217 | $83,764 |
| VT | $109,750 | $80,906 | $83,723 |
| KS | $100,620 | $74,290 | $82,577 |
| HI | $126,250 | $89,406 | $82,319 |
| LA | $92,990 | $71,845 | $81,323 |
| WI | $101,550 | $75,697 | $81,309 |
| RI | $109,420 | $81,962 | $80,821 |
| OK | $94,000 | $71,230 | $80,680 |
| UT | $99,690 | $74,526 | $78,446 |
| NE | $92,550 | $70,431 | $77,932 |
| ME | $101,730 | $74,766 | $77,001 |
| MS | $87,690 | $67,104 | $76,873 |
| MT | $81,950 | $63,213 | $70,046 |
Sources and assumptions
- Treat the numbers for this job as a midpoint, not a promise. The national middle is $129,180, 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 this job 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 Washington, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $117,167.
- One price figure per state stands behind the real-terms numbers for this job. Inside any state, a big city costs far more than a small town, so this is a fair way to compare states with each other and a poor way to price a specific move. The wage figures and the price figures are also from different years. At the bottom of the range sits Montana, on $70,046.
- These are distribution medians for information security analysts, with a national value of $129,180. 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 information security analysts 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 $117,167, in Washington. Municipal and school-district income taxes are excluded, which understates the burden materially in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland and parts of a few other states.
- Real-terms results for information security analysts rest on statewide regional price parities, which average over intra-state variation that is itself larger than much of the interstate variation. They support comparison between states and not the pricing of an individual relocation; Montana anchors the distribution at $70,046. Wage and price series are published on separate cycles and therefore carry different reference periods.