Every year, I run a salary survey for folks in the database industry. This year, I was especially curious to see the results to find out whether salaries went up. Anecdotally, I’ve seen a lot of people jumping ship to new companies due to the Great Resignation – but what does the data actually show? Let’s find out.
Download the results here and slice & dice ’em to see what’s important to you.
I’m a database administrator, so I filtered for DBAs in the United States and then looked at average salary, and yes, it took a pretty good jump this year:
About a 5% raise, much higher than previous years:
That’s a good sign, but I’ll leave it to y’all to dig into the numbers that mean the most to you, and in the comments, tell me what you see.
Update: Mattia Nocerino has a free Tableau report with this year’s data.
33 Comments. Leave new
The Cost-of-Living Adjustment (COLA) for 2022 is 5.9%.. so any raise below 6% is not a raise at all….. But 5% is better than 3% or 2% in any case…..
Yeah, exactly!
My raise last year, after getting an excellent review, was 1% and will probably be 1% again.
but.. i stay as my day is 9 to 5 no afterhours. ever!
Great stuff Brent and interesting data. I shall have a play
Thanks for this. right off the bat, I see (1) what Denis Gabo said is absolutely true for some of us – the “raise” is not really a raise but a cost-of-living adjustment at best; and (2) it seems that going over 6 figures (barely in the case of, say, 105,000) can stall one’s increases. By these charts, I effectively have a 2017 salary – even lower if adjusted for inflation.
Thanks for the Data. I think with this type of information it’s a challenge to analyse it as the cost and quality of life varies around the world and when you start to narrow the searches down there is a limited number of samples.
The Tableau report is good, I need to start to play with the BI technology more…
Thanks.
Thanks! It was challenging, but I sure had fun making it!
What’s with the SEVEN figure salaries?
They’re definitely outliers, but I know at least two DBAs who have cleared seven figures a year a couple times in their career thanks to wild bonuses, or running their own consultancies.
Who is the other one?
Hahaha, no, I don’t count myself and I don’t fill out the survey since my role is kinda weird. I haven’t been a DBA for quite a while.
What’s a self-identified “DBA” nowadays anyway, really? It has a a bit of a legacy connotation feel to it for me from the mid 2000’s when on-premise, physical, relational databases were thee most important thing for a company’s entire operations.
But, now with things more spread out across multiple services and data formats, all database servers completely virtualized in the cloud, processes and operations connected directly, or indirectly, via web service-based applications.
Clearly, there’s more varied nuance, titles, roles, responsibilities, and skills nowadays more than ever in the primary person(s) that oversee lots of databases and servers. I do DBA stuff, including upgrades, patches, maintenance, user permissions, and query performance tuning for my organization, but I’m not a DBA. I don’t know what I am, to be honest. I’m a generalist who works with data A-Z, 24/7 🙂
Heh… I’m thinking that qualifies you to be a part of the great misnomer known as “DBA”. 😀
Its someone who get subjected to the user problems of self-aggrandizing users within an organization, that because they think they are important, have the right to go the the highest ranked technical person in the org who doesn’t know anything about printer, application, desktop, smartphone, etc support and can’t understand the userese being used to describe said problems. All the while there are a plethora of resources at the help desk who cost the org less than the DBA, actually have support tools to do user support and can figure out their problems better and faster.
Brent, thanks for doing this every year. As some folks notice, there are some things one has to be aware of when looking at the data but that’s not your fault. I really appreciate this chunk’o data every year.
Thank you, Brent. Always insightful. Fascinating to see from a South African perspective (where I’m at) for 2021, and 2020: 6 participants only. Interestingly enough, for the United States, down from 1143 for 2020, to 591 in 2021.
Thanks Brent for making this survey and also publishing my report!
It’s always inspiring to see this kind of data.
It allows you to really sit down and think of what you can achive in this world if you put the work in it.
I’d like to recommend everyone the session from Doug Lane that he held at SQL Pass 2021 called “What are you worth”. Here’s the link: https://reg.passdatacommunitysummit.com/flow/redgate/summit2021/portal/page/sessions/session/1635889945617001gL5Z
i am unable to get to the doug lane link provided
You have to be registered with PASS first: https://passdatacommunitysummit.com
i did not attend pass and I cannot find a way to register
If you didn’t register, you can’t now. Perhaps Doug will deliver it again somewhere.
Not much of a gender gap if you limit to USA and ignore the Amazon RDS outlier. That’s good to see. I’m hoping to see google on here in the future. Also, it would be cool to include no-SQL databases in the mix.
Not sure what you mean. In the US, there are only 7 females that earn more than I do, but over 100+ men that earn more than me. I have over 20 years as a data professional (DBA, engineer, etc. etc.). Would like to see that metric closer to 50/50 male/female earn more than me 🙂
no one complains about the 99% of women in nursing or teaching.
Krazner – since my father was a nurse, I can tell you that yes, people do complain about the lack of diversity in nursing.
If you have questions about diversity, feel free to email me directly with the Contact Brent link at the top of the blog, rather than confronting others publicly. I wouldn’t want to have to de-pants you here in the comments. 😉
My raise for 2022 is 91.4K USD as a Senior Oracle DBA. My previous 2020 salary was 79.5K USD . I got a 15% raise for 2022.
That’s a good thing, John. You should have a look at what “typical” is for Senior Oracle DBAs, though.
Something seems a bit off with these survey results
the Top salaries are above 500k? the highest result is 1.8 Million? seems absurd for someone to be making this much.
I do actually know Microsoft data platform folks in that range, yes.
I’m in the mid 130Ks so don’t let the bosses see that’s on the higher side (sans the few $1M folks), they’ll think we’re overpaid! Even though we do the work of 4 people ; ) Thanks for putting this together!
.. is that in USD ?
.. per Year / Month ?
greez from switzerland
The survey clearly stated USD per year. Cheers!
I definitely have to move from Brasil to the USA