What is the average salary for Data Scientists?

The average salary for Data Scientists is $151K per year, weighted across all cities with data and based on 2415 public records.

Which cities pay Data Scientists the most?

The highest-paying cities for Data Scientists include San Mateo, CA, Mountain View, CA, Palo Alto, CA.

What skills do Data Scientists need?

Key skills for Data Scientists include Domain Expertise, Problem Solving, Communication, Collaboration, Analytical Thinking.

Data Scientists

Salary benchmarks based on 2415 public records across 61 cities.

What do Data Scientists do?

Develop and implement a set of techniques or analytics applications to transform raw data into meaningful information using data-oriented programming languages and visualization software. Apply data mining, data modeling, natural language processing, and machine learning to extract and analyze information from large structured and unstructured datasets. Visualize, interpret, and report data findings. May create dynamic data reports. Excludes “Statisticians” (15-2041), “Cartographers and Photogrammetrists” (17-1021), and “Health Information Technologists and Medical Registrars” (29-9021).

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, SOC 2018 (SOC 15-2051)

What our data shows for Data Scientists

RoleHue publishes 2,415 salary records for Data Scientists, across 61 cities. Weighted by how many records each city contributes, the band runs from $128,381 at the 25th percentile to $176,209 at the 75th, a spread of $47,828 around $151,408. Each of those three figures averages the city-level percentiles rather than ranking the pooled records, and weights each city by how many records it holds, so the cities we hold most data for pull them hardest. Measured against that $151,408 figure rather than in dollars (32% of it), that spread is mid-pack among the roles we cover.

San Mateo, CA carries the highest median we hold for the role at $209,000; Pittsburgh, PA the lowest at $85,000, a gap of $124,000. The middle half of those city medians, weighted by how many records each city contributes, spans $45,735, narrower than the $47,828 band within cities: for Data Scientists, where a record sits within its own metro separates our numbers more than which metro it came from.

No single metro carries most of this: the largest share is New York, NY, with 313 of the 2,415 records we publish for this role (13%). Evidence clears 25 records in 23 of the 61 cities; for the rest, the city median we show rests on fewer records than that.