Data Engineer salary
What a data engineer actually earns, from 861 live job postings blended with the official US OEWS (Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics) wage anchor. Pick a market for its median and range, then read the seniority split, the trend, and the country comparison below. Updated 2026-09-06.
Switch the market above to see data engineer pay in the 7 countries our sources cover, each with its own cost of living. The trend, seniority, and state detail below are United States data, where the official record runs deepest.
What the number means
Data engineering carries the premium for owning the pipes rather than querying them. The blended US median is about 126,000 dollars, well above the data-analyst band, with an OEWS median of 135,980 under the database-administrators-and-architects category. Unemployment is a moderate 2.4 percent, lower than the crowded analyst tier, because the skill set is scarcer: building and running reliable pipelines at scale is closer to software engineering than to analysis. Pay rose 10 percent since 2021 as every company that hired analysts discovered it also needed the infrastructure to feed them. For a data analyst, this is the most common and best-paid step up, and it starts from a position of strength, because the SQL (Structured Query Language) and Python are already in hand. What separates the bands is orchestration and the on-call ownership of data other teams depend on, which is exactly the gap worth closing.
Open data engineer roles
Live openings tagged to this occupation, from company career pages and remote boards. Apply at the source.
Data Engineer - Practice Cloud Transformation chez MARGO at MARGOParisTodayApply- Lead Data Engineer @Panora (backed by Hexa) at HexaParisTodayApply
Data Engineer at LeidosUnited Kingdom · Remote$84k–$108kTodayApply
(Senior) Azure Data Engineer - Full Remote at goPro Consultancy Group ltd.United States · RemoteTodayApply
Data Engineer - Azure Data Engineer and Monitoring at JalasoftColombia · RemoteTodayApply- Data Engineer at Sales ConsultingRomania · RemoteTodayApply
By seniority
Posted-median pay by seniority signal in the title, from our corpus. Noisy at the edges where sample sizes are small.
By country
- United States$118,309$147,787$184,923
- Canada$78,074$91,403$113,124
- United Kingdom$68,218$84,772$109,149
- Australia$94,969$114,680$157,470
- France$48,617$55,479$64,677
- Netherlands$61,144$70,139$80,766
- India$12,136$18,269$23,358
Switzerland · official wage bands
median CHF 9'949/month
Swiss postings do not state pay, so these are not posted salaries: they are the federal wage survey (Lohnstrukturerhebung 2024) for the ISCO group 25 Spezialisten in der Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologie: standardized gross monthly, full-time, 13th salary included pro rata. The band covers the whole occupation group, which is coarser than this occupation alone.
Annual ≈ CHF 119'388 at the median. Source: Bundesamt für Statistik, LSE 2024.
Top-paying US states
OEWS median by state, highest first.
- Massachusetts$161,160
- California$159,130
- Colorado$151,460
- Washington$144,050
- Maryland$140,710
- Illinois$134,490
Roles that pay more, that these skills already reach
Median pay from each destination’s own postings, with the readiness a data engineer profile already covers.
- 600 open software engineer roles$185,617 median · +$37,830 · 29% readiness
- 600 open solutions architect roles$162,988 median · +$15,201 · 59% readiness
Every measured move out of this role, ranked by readiness: alternative careers for a data engineer.
Is your offer fair?
Run a specific number through FairElephant, which weighs it against this data, your location, and remote market rates.
Move into or out of data engineer
- data analyst → data engineermeasured route
Related salaries
- Data Analyst salary$100,249 median
- Data Scientist salary$152,167 median
- Software Engineer salary$185,617 median
Quick answers
How much do data engineers make?
The blended US median is about 126,000 dollars, above the data-analyst band, with the official BLS OEWS median at 135,980. The typical range is 113,000 to 152,000.
Do data engineers make more than data analysts?
Yes, meaningfully, and with lower unemployment (2.4 percent versus 4.9), because building and running pipelines at scale is a scarcer, engineering-grade skill.
How do you become a data engineer from a data analyst?
Close the orchestration and infrastructure gap (dbt, Airflow, warehouse modeling) on top of the SQL and Python you already use. See the data-analyst-to-data-engineer route.
Method: bands are the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles of live US postings with stated pay, shrunk toward the official OEWS anchor by sample size (the “blended” figure). Trend is the OEWS annual median for SOC (Standard Occupational Classification) code 15-1243. Unemployment is the 2025 BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics) CPS (Current Population Survey) annual-average rate for “Database administrators and architects.” Live corpus 861 observations, 2026-09-06. Definitions in the glossary.