How much do database administrators, analysts, architects, developers, and data scientists make? We asked, and 3,113 of you from 73 countries answered this year.

Download the 2018 & 2017 results in Excel.
A few things to know about it:
- The data is public domain. The license tab makes it clear that you can use this data for any purpose, and you don’t have to credit or mention anyone.
- The spreadsheet includes both 2017 & 2018 results. For the new questions this year, the 2017 answers are populated with Not Asked.
- The postal code field was totally optional, and may be wildly unreliable. Folks asked to be able to put in small portions of their zip code, like the leading numbers.
Blog posts about the results:
- Female DBAs Make Less Money. Why? by Brent Ozar
- Practicing Statistics: Female DBAs and Salary by Eugene Meidinger
- Integrating R Script and Script Visuals with Power BI by Ginger Grant – which includes a 1-hour video
- It Pays to Stay Home by Melissa Connors
- Building a DBA Salary Calculator, Part 0: Initial Findings by Eugene Meidinger
- Analyzing Salary Data with Power BI and R, Part 1 by Ginger Grant – which includes the Power BI PBIX file for you to work with
Want your blog post in that list? Leave a comment here and we’ll add it. Next Friday (Jan 19), I’ll publish the full list in our Monday newsletter along with relevant salary negotiation articles. It’s a great way to get yourself a big bump in reader traffic. I’m curious to see what you find!
19 Comments. Leave new
Just a thought for 2019. Might be worth adding a few other columns. Like, “did you negotiate your salary or accept the default offer” or “how many offers did you turn down before accepting your last role”? Basically trying to flush out if someone tends to take what they can get vs. someone who very patient and goes after what they want / feel they deserve.
Eric – sure, each year, we post a call for changes in advance of the survey. You’re totally welcome to chime in then – in the meantime, be thinking about the exact wording for both the questions and answers that you want to propose. Consider how you’d like to analyze the data as well.
[…] the recently released 2018 Data Professionals Salary Survey gathered by Brent Ozar, we will use R to explore how to determine what combinations of answers are found in the top 25% of […]
Ahh, so that’s why my page views suddenly quintupled.
I blogged about the results here: https://blogs.sentryone.com/melissaconnors/data-professionals-salary-pays-stay-home/
Melissa – awesome, thanks for the heads up! I added your post to the list. Thanks!
Thanks, Brent! 🙂
Hello Brent,
Following Eric Singer’s thoughts about next year survey and as an European citizen, could you put a fixed converstion ratio EUR/USD, like 1€=1.20$ ?
Thank for all the work you’re doing tho!
Matt – sure, each year, we post a call for changes in advance of the survey. You’re totally welcome to chime in then – in the meantime, be thinking about the exact wording for both the questions and answers that you want to propose. Consider how you’d like to analyze the data as well.
I’m finding it hard to believe that Full-Time-Employees are paid a ‘salary’ upwards of $300,000. Maybe they’re converting hourly rate (say $200/hr) * 2000 for annual income ?
Several years ago, I interviewed for a $250k/year job (plus benefits, etc) so I can believe it.
[…] planning on building a salary calculator based on the data from Brent Ozar’s salary survey. I already played around with some of the numbers earlier. This time I’m planning on going a lot […]
[…] Brent Ozar’s salary survey: https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2018/01/2018-data-professionals-salary-survey-results/ […]
What’s with the humungous gap between the US and the UK? 107k to 65k.
Probably dollars to pounds. The pound is worth about $1.35 which would make 65k pounds more like 87k dollars.
Well now, I see I’m being paid above market for the number of years I’ve been working with this SQL Server… I should try to be less salty now.
-OR-
I’m a total bad a$$ DBA! 😀
This data is awesome. Thanks Brent !!
Is it really possible to make $1.45 Million being a manager full time? Or is that typo 🙂
Is it net or gross?
[…] this series, I’m going to use the 2018 Data Professionals Salary Survey. I took a look at the 2017 version when it came out, and then another look at the 2017 survey […]