Salary Survey Extra: Average salary for certified IT workers by U.S. state

Posted on

October 15, 2020

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Attention, U.S. IT professionals! What state do you live in? And how does your salary stack up next to our averages?

There are IT jobs in every U.S. state. If you have the right very particular set of skills — our apologies to Liam Neeson — and probably especially if those skills are backed by a certification, then you're likely to find work just about wherever you look for it. Not only that, but many IT jobs are work-from-home gigs that don't require your presence at a physical office.

Given the manner in which IT employment has redrawn traditional workplace boundaries, there may not be as much to gain from a state-by-state comparison of IT salaries as there once was. Workers in general, and IT workers in particular, aren't as tied to a single physical location as used to be the case. Certainly that's the case across the current pandemic-scrambled employment landscape.

On the other hand, it's always interesting to see where, on average, the highest IT earners tend to be clustered. And in drawing that data out of our most recent annual Salary Survey, we also detected the possible presence of IT hotspots: states that produced the largest numbers of survey respondents.

As noted elsewhere in our survey findings, the average annual salary across all certified IT professionals in the United States last year was $102,880. So how does that look when you compare individual states?

Out of the more than 5,000 certified IT professionals to take the survey at the end of last year, 52 percent live mostly in 44 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. (We got dramatically limited participation from seven states — Hawaii, Maine, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming — and the territory of Puerto Rico.)

In sketching the IT employment landscape of America, we've ranked every state that supplied at least 1 percent of our total U.S. survey population. The remaining states are given in a separate list, with the caution that smaller samples produce less reliable data. Call this divide our A-List, and our B-List.

With all that said, where in America did we end up in our search for the most robust average annual salary figures?

U.S. STATES BY AVERAGE ANNUAL SALARY (A-List)

Note: Total of surveyed individuals from each of these states is equal to or greater than 1 percent of the total number of U.S. survey respondents.
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Rank	State	Average Annual Salary	Percentage of All U.S. Respondents Who Are from this State
1	Maryland	$133,520	4.4 percent
2	Virginia	$121,150	4.9 percent
3	California	$117,670	10.4 percent
4	New York	$112,300	3.7 percent
5	Washington	$111,350	3.2 percent
6	North Carolina	$108,910	3.8 percent
7	Arizona	$108,320	2.1 percent
8	New Jersey	$107,060	2.4 percent
9	Minnesota	$106,780	2.5 percent
10	Michigan	$104,400	2.4 percent
11	Ohio	$103,420	3.8 percent
12	South Carolina	$103,000	1.3 percent
13	Texas	$102,550	8.8 percent
14	Alabama	$101,630	1.1 percent
15	Massachusetts	$100,000	3.1 percent
16	Georgia	$99,340	3.4 percent
17	Colorado	$99,250	4 percent
18	Nevada	$98,130	1.1 percent
19	Missouri	$98,010	1.6 percent
20	Illinois	$95,050	3.5 percent
21	Florida	$93,510	6.2 percent
22	Pennsylvania	$89,160	3.7 percent
23	Indiana	$88,270	2 percent
24	Tennessee	$81,650	2 percent
25	Utah	$65,830	1.4 percent
26	Idaho	$62,580	1.6 percent

2020 Salary Data

‍U.S. STATES BY AVERAGE ANNUAL SALARY (B-List)

Note: Total of surveyed individuals from each of these states is less than 1 percent of the total number of U.S. survey respondents.
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Rank	State	Average Annual Salary	Percentage of All U.S. Survey Respondents Who Are from this State
1	Kansas	$118,890	0.7 percent
2	Nebraska	$107,950	0.8 percent
3	Delaware	$107,500	0.3 percent
4	Iowa	$105,970	0.7 percent
5	Washington, D.C.	$103,130	0.4 percent
6	Kentucky	$96,000	0.8 percent
7	Wisconsin	$92,500	0.6 percent
8	Arkansas	$91,500	0.8 percent
9	Alaska	$90,250	0.4 percent
10	Connecticut	$89,170	0.8 percent
11	Rhode Island	$81,610	0.5 percent
12	Oregon	$77,860	0.7 percent
13	Montana	$77,500	0.4 percent
14	Oklahoma	$76,390	0.7 percent
15	New Mexico	$76,250	0.5 percent
16	West Virginia	$68,440	0.4 percent
17	Mississippi	$68,000	0.4 percent
18	Louisiana	$52,930	0.8 percent

2020 Salary Data

About the Author

Certification Magazine was launched in 1999 and remained in print until mid-2008. Publication was restarted on a quarterly basis in February 2014. Subscribe to CertMag here.

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