Announcing the 2026 Data Professional Salary Survey Results, And They’re Great!
The results are in! You can download the raw data in Excel for all 10 years and do some slicing and dicing to find out whether you’re underpaid, overpaid, or what it looks like for folks who are out there looking for work.
This year, I added a couple of new items to the survey asking about folks who are unemployed and currently looking for work. In hindsight, I wish I would have done this long ago so that we could have a baseline to know whether things have gotten better or worse. Ah, well – the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, and the second-best time is now. Let’s dig into the data and see what we find.
First off, salaries for DBAs (of any type) employed in the United States are up over last year, big time:
Woohoo! We’re in the money, and it’s the same for outside the United States – big jump here too:
Inflation might be up, depending on your salary or your country’s currency purchasing power, but I’m not going into those economic details – I’ll leave that to the more ambitious readers. My job here is just to host the survey, gather the data, and hand it to those smart folks to do their analysis.
If we look at non-DBAs worldwide, the story is still in the black, but not quite as pretty:
The primary database for all job types, worldwide, is still overwhelmingly SQL Server:
Most of the responses are still DBAs, but there’s a good chunk of architects, developers, engineers, and managers too:
About the New Unemployment Questions
So, who’s looking for work, and how long have they been looking?
The response counts here are fairly low, so I don’t wanna read too much into this, but I’d encourage you to check out the max months that people have been looking for work. These numbers are big.
Granted, some job seekers have very specific requirements, like a specific geographic area or high salary requirements relative to their peers, but… so do some of you employed folks, dear reader. I just want you to be careful when you see these skyrocketing salary numbers that you don’t get too greedy when talking to management about the raise numbers you’d like to see. If your numbers get too high, you might paint a target on yourself – and if you end up looking, it could be an awful long time before you find another job this cushy.
12 Comments. Leave new
Thanks for doing this. I love to see this data.
My pleasure!
Not surprised on the SQL server side. You are offering education services to the SQL server community. I would expect Oracle as the primary database if you were a top Oracle consultant.
That said. Nice survey and definitely interesting for everyone interesting in salaries in the SQL server world.
“he best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, and the second-best time is now”… the second best time was 19 years ago 😛
NO NO IT WAS 21 YEARS AGO
Wait a second: have you noticed in the first 3 tables how the “People” columns gets reduced by 2/3 in the last 10 years? This is brutal.
While the salary goes up the number of people hired goes down.
Nah, the people column was more of a function of how new the survey was initially. There wasn’t anything like it in the market at the time, so LOTS of people filled it out on a whim. Once they knew if they were over or underpaid, the fill-outs dropped dramatically, quickly.
Now it makes sense. Thank you
Correct me if I’m wrong but your blog has been increasing in views in the last 10 years.
I don’t think there are less people participating in the survey.
I think there are actually less people working in SQL Server.
I love your thinking, but no, those two numbers aren’t correlated. You’ll want to dig more deeply into the data. Cheers!
I’ll second Brent in not being too greedy if you’re in a cushy position — I’ve been out in the cold a lot longer than I’d like recently and DBA positions seem to be practically nonexistent in the UK these days. I’ve spoken to more than one company that simply won’t consider even having a DBA or anybody in charge of data, but I don’t think (or at least I hope) this isn’t the norm — I’ve been assuming that all the DBA roles are just already filled by people who are bedded in long-term.
Of course it could be that I’m not looking for jobs in the right places anymore; jobs sites that I’ve used previously have merged and closed and I’m seeing a lot more roles advertised that turn out to not exist than I used to. But I’ve spoken to a few recruiters who’ve echoed what I’m seeing — the term du jour is “data engineer”, which may or may not carry DBA responsibilities; whereas previously everyone was a DBA which may or may not have carried data engineering responsibilities.
Just don’t rest on your laurels — and make yourself indispensable without achieving job security through obscurity.
I love that you do this and I once used as a source in a Power BI report to show why I should get a pay adjustment (which they gave me). (I probably made a comment here last year about it too…)
I’m 20+ years with SQL Server, but in the last 2 years have been 80% Fabric/Synapse. Not a lot of people listing that yet (2), but I’m wondering if that shift has had much influence on salary and / or employment.