Data Center Salary Survey 2026: What 179 Job Postings Actually Printed

That is the whole method, and it is the only thing on this page that counts as a survey.

Nobody here phoned 1,500 people. This page counts job postings, which are documents an employer publishes under its own name, with a requisition number printed on them. You can open every one and check the number yourself.

What follows is what those 179 postings printed: pay by role, pay by seniority, what changes across state lines and what does not, and the four places where the postings flatly disagree with the recruiter survey most of this industry quotes.

You will also find the gaps. Sixty seven of the 179 postings printed no pay figure at all, and that silence turns out to be one of the more useful things in the count.

How this data center salary survey was run

This is a posting census, not an opinion poll. On October 4, 2026, dcgeeks opened job postings one at a time on the employers’ own career sites and transcribed what each one printed.

The count:

• 179 postings opened and read across 13 job boards.
• 11 employers that posted data center roles: Amazon Web Services, T5 Data Centers / EverOn, ServerFarm, Cologix, TierPoint, Cloudflare, xAI, Carrier, F6 Data Solutions, Black & Veatch and M. A. Mortenson Company.
• 112 postings printed a pay band.
• 67 printed nothing at all.
• 860 postings enumerated on board indexes for the title counts further down, which is a bigger number than 179 because an index gives you a title and a city without giving you a band.
• One day. Every figure on this page was read on October 4, 2026.

Every dollar figure below carries the requisition number it came from. Where a figure has no requisition number, it is labelled as coming from a government release or a named report, and the release date sits beside it.

Amazon prints no posting date on any job page, so the honest phrase is “read on October 4, 2026”, never “posted on”. Amazon also prints no dollar sign: its compensation lines run USA, VA, Ashburn – 37.64 – 65.91 USD hourly. Any transcript of an Amazon band showing a dollar sign has been through a summariser.

What this count cannot tell you

A posting is what an employer offers to pay a new hire today. It is not what the people already in the building earn, it is not total compensation, and it is not a headcount-weighted average. An employer with 400 technicians and two open roles contributes two rows here.

These employers could not be read at all, and their absence is a real hole in the count: every employer hosting on Workday, which includes Flexential, STACK, QTS, Aligned, JLL, CBRE, Stantec, Jacobs and AECOM. Three Mortenson postings returned a 404 during the session. Fifteen F6 Data Solutions postings expired inside the same session. One returned a server error. Congruex publishes data center work but prints the words “Competitive Pay” instead of a figure, and its posting detail host could not be reached.

Nothing was estimated to fill those holes.

Key data center pay numbers for 2026

Figure	What it measures	Source and date
179 postings	Live data center job postings opened and read by hand	dcgeeks posting census, October 4, 2026
112 of 179	Postings that printed a pay band at all	dcgeeks posting census, October 4, 2026
37.64 to 65.91 USD hourly	Data center technician band printed in eight cities on one requisition	Amazon requisition 10537803, read October 4, 2026
129,200.00 to 193,000.00 USD annually	Data center facilities manager band printed in six metros across four states	Amazon requisitions 10530761, 10552253, 10560717, 10560234, 10555735, 10529757 and 10553816, read October 4, 2026
13% additional pay	Night shift differential printed numerically, 6:00pm to 6:00am shifts	Amazon requisitions 10537803, 10535850, 10523766, 10507095, 10496123 and 10494921, read October 4, 2026
53% of operators	Report difficulty finding qualified candidates, up from 46% in 2025, n=607	Uptime Institute Global Data Center Survey 2026, July 2026
25.1% and 120,400 jobs	Projected growth in computing infrastructure, data processing and web hosting, 2025 to 2035	US Bureau of Labor Statistics, USDL-26-1422, August 27, 2026

The finding: one employer, one job title, one town, 40 percent apart

Boardman is a town of about 4,000 people in eastern Oregon with a large Amazon data center campus. On October 4, 2026, Amazon had four live postings there for the same job.

Three of them printed this:

One of them printed this:

The BASIC QUALIFICATIONS section is word for word identical on all four. High school or equivalent diploma. Four or more years in a management position with five or more direct reports. Five or more years in a data center or other mission critical environment with knowledge of UPS, generators, HVAC and evaporators, or seven or more years of technical training.

Same employer. Same title. Same town. Same stated requirements. The high band is 40.7 percent above the low one at the floor and 40.2 percent above it at the ceiling, a difference of $37,400 and $55,300.

Here is why that matters more than it looks.

The salary survey this industry quotes most often ranks ten US states by average data center pay. Its top state sits at $207,000 and its bottom state at $151,000, a spread of 37.1 percent.

One employer, posting one title in one small Oregon town on one day, produced a wider spread than the entire ten-state ranking.

A state average cannot survive that. If the variation inside a single town exceeds the variation between the best and worst states in the country, then a state ranking is mostly measuring which jobs happened to get counted in each state, not what the state pays.

Requisition 10559228 was read twice to make sure. It prints the low band.

What each employer actually printed

This is the census, employer by employer. The band column shows one real example from that employer with its requisition number, not an average of anything.

Employer	Postings read	Printed a band	Example title and band as printed	Requisition
Amazon Web Services	39	39	Data Center Engineering Operations Technician, 37.64 – 65.91 USD hourly	10537803
T5 Data Centers / EverOn	27	4	Critical Facilities Technician, Chicago IL, $84,000-$94,000	Lever posting 63688729-9ff4-44ed-a1c1-dd11e925a379
ServerFarm	22	14	Data Center Technician, Moses Lake WA, $33 – $38 an hour	Lever posting f15a48ca-4370-4011-a42a-3681f5d1486c
Cologix	19	15	Data Center Technician, Columbus OH, $28 – $35 an hour	Lever posting aed96509-3f41-487e-acd0-8d7fbaa386b5
TierPoint	10	0	Operations Technician I, Saint Louis MO, no figure printed	3041
Cloudflare	6	5	Data Center Engineer, $120,000 – $165,000 and $98,000 – $135,000 on one posting	8074364
xAI	8	0	Data Center Operations Technician, Memphis TN, no figure printed	board listing, no band
Carrier	5	5	HVAC Data Center Chiller Technician, Omaha NE, $38.00 – $76.00 per hour	30205951
F6 Data Solutions	18	12	Commercial HVAC Technicians, Virginia, $40 – $50 per hour	5406190008
Black & Veatch	18	11	Electrical Engineer – Data Centers, Darien IL, $126,423.00 – $211,134.00	116337
M. A. Mortenson Company	7	7	General Superintendent – Data Center Construction, Cedar Rapids IA, $178,800 MIN – $268,200 MAX	22530

Two boards were read and produced no data center pay rows at all. Syska Hennessy’s board carried about 29 postings and zero data center or mission critical titles on the day. Congruex listed data center fiber work and printed the words “Competitive Pay” rather than a number.

Data center salary by job role in 2026

Pay in this industry is set by what the job touches, not by the word “data center” in the title. The roles that keep a live building running sit in one band. The roles that design and build the next one sit well above it.

Role as the employer titles it	Band exactly as printed	Employer and requisition	Years asked
Junior Critical Facilities Technician	$54,000-$65,000 a year	T5 Data Centers, Lever posting 2174dae8-417b-4523-893b-c79c5773a45b, Chicago IL	not stated, high school diploma
Junior Critical Facilities Technician	$20 – $24 an hour	ServerFarm, Lever posting fccd5935-a558-4975-99c2-94906266f182, Houston TX	preferably 1
Data Center Technician	$28 – $35 an hour	Cologix, Lever posting aed96509-3f41-487e-acd0-8d7fbaa386b5, Columbus OH	2+ preferred
Data Center Technician	$33 – $38 an hour	ServerFarm, Lever posting f15a48ca-4370-4011-a42a-3681f5d1486c, Moses Lake WA	not stated
Data Center Technician, Data Center Operations	27.98 – 48.99 USD hourly	Amazon 10553943, Frederick MD	2+ hardware, 1+ networking
Data Center Engineering Operations Technician	37.64 – 65.91 USD hourly	Amazon 10537803, eight cities	2+
Critical Facilities Technician	$84,000-$94,000 a year	T5 Data Centers, Lever posting 63688729-9ff4-44ed-a1c1-dd11e925a379, Chicago IL	5+
Data Center Electrician	$50 – $55 an hour	Cologix, Lever posting 5465ac4b-a315-439f-b325-8a742d4f4a88, Columbus OH	5+ electrical mission critical
HVAC Data Center Chiller Technician, Journeyman, Union	$38.00 – $76.00 per hour	Carrier 30205951, Omaha NE	5+ HVAC, 3+ on 300 ton chillers
Data Center Operations Manager	78,400.00 – 137,300.00 USD annually	Amazon 10560777, New Carlisle IN	4+ IT, 2+ people management
Data Center Facilities Manager	129,200.00 – 193,000.00 USD annually	Amazon 10530761, Boardman OR	4+ management, 5+ mission critical
Commissioning Engineer	116,800.00 – 160,000.00 USD annually	Amazon 10501354, New Carlisle IN	5+
Electrical Engineer – Data Centers	$126,423.00 – $211,134.00	Black & Veatch 116337, Darien IL	5 minimum
Data Center Regional Chief Engineer	139,300.00 – 208,000.00 USD annually	Amazon 10566567, three cities	5+ facilities management
Senior Electrical Engineer – Data Centers	$170,508 – $284,736	Black & Veatch 113542, Arlington VA	11 minimum
General Superintendent – Data Center Construction	$178,800 MIN – $268,200 MAX	Mortenson 22530, Cedar Rapids IA	14, or 10 in a trade plus a degree

Three things in that table are worth sitting with.

The cheapest and most expensive technician rows are both real, both current and both from an employer you have heard of. Cologix pays $28 an hour at the floor in Columbus. Carrier pays $38 at the floor for a union chiller journeyman in Omaha and runs to $76 at the top. Those are the same industry and almost the same building.

Nothing in this census prints a band for a “data center engineer” as such. The engineering money is printed under Electrical Engineer, Mechanical Engineer and Commissioning Engineer, and a reader searching only the first phrase never sees it.

Hourly bands are left hourly here on purpose. Multiplying 37.64 by 2,080 hours gives $78,291, but that assumes no overtime, no shift differential and a full year, and Amazon prints a 13 percent night differential on that exact requisition. An hourly job converted to a salary is an estimate wearing a disguise.

Data center salary by seniority level

The ladder below is built only from postings that print both a band and the years of experience asked. Each rung is a real requisition, not an average of a level.

Rung	Band as printed	Years asked	Employer and requisition
Entry, no experience required	$54,000-$65,000 a year	none stated, high school diploma	T5 Data Centers, Lever posting 2174dae8-417b-4523-893b-c79c5773a45b
One year	32.88 – 57.50 USD hourly	1+	Amazon 10552762, seven cities
Two years	37.64 – 65.91 USD hourly	2+	Amazon 10537803, eight cities
Five years, technician	$84,000-$94,000 a year	5+	T5 Data Centers, Lever posting 63688729-9ff4-44ed-a1c1-dd11e925a379
Five years, manager	129,200.00 – 193,000.00 USD annually	4+ management and 5+ mission critical	Amazon 10530761
Five years, chief engineer	139,300.00 – 208,000.00 USD annually	5+ facilities management	Amazon 10566567
Eleven years, senior engineer	$170,508 – $284,736	11 minimum	Black & Veatch 113542, Arlington VA
Fourteen years, construction	$178,800 MIN – $268,200 MAX	14	Mortenson 22530

The step that matters most is the one between the one year band and the two year band at the same employer. Amazon prints 32.88 to 57.50 at one year of electrical or mechanical experience and 37.64 to 65.91 at two years. That is 14.5 percent at the floor and 14.6 percent at the ceiling for twelve months on the job, printed by the same company in the same week.

Both ends move by almost the same fraction, which is what a genuine level step looks like. Compare that with the Boardman pair at the top of this page, where the requirements did not move at all and the band moved 40 percent.

If you are working out which rung you are on, the data center career path walks through what each step asks for.

Which US states pay data center salaries the highest

This is the question readers ask most, and the census answers it in a way most salary pages do not: in 2026 the largest data center employer in the United States mostly does not adjust pay by state at all.

Amazon requisition 10537803 prints one band, 37.64 to 65.91 USD hourly, for Jeffersonville Ohio, Portland Oregon, and Ashburn, Chantilly, Dulles, Fredericksburg, Louisa and Mineral in Virginia. Eight cities, three states, one set of numbers, one requisition. Portland pays Ashburn money.

The same employer prints 129,200.00 to 193,000.00 USD annually for a facilities manager in Manassas Virginia, Ashburn Virginia, Leesburg Virginia, Frederick Maryland, Mesa Arizona and Boardman Oregon. Six metros, four states, zero adjustment.

Where Amazon does discount a city, it says so in one line. Requisition 10552762 lists eight cities at once. Seven of them print 32.88 to 57.50 USD hourly. Canton, Mississippi prints 29.61 to 51.73, which is 9.9 percent lower at the floor and 10.0 percent lower at the ceiling. One requisition, identical qualifications, both ends moving together: that is a real geographic cut, and it is the only one found in the 39 Amazon postings read on October 4, 2026.

Three employers, three different geographic policies, one week

Employer	How it prices geography	Evidence
Amazon Web Services	Mostly flat. One band printed across eight cities and three states on a single requisition, with one city cut by 10 percent.	Requisitions 10537803 and 10552762, read October 4, 2026
Cloudflare	Prices by named jurisdiction, and the discount is not one number. Colorado sits 18.3 percent below Washington DC on one posting and 9.5 percent below on another.	Requisitions 8074364 and 8099671, read October 4, 2026
M. A. Mortenson Company	Publishes its own uplift schedule on the posting: Denver and Chicago 5 percent, Seattle and Portland 10 percent, Washington DC 12.5 percent.	Requisition 22530, read October 4, 2026
Carrier	Flat nationwide. $38.00 – $76.00 per hour printed in Nebraska, Alabama, Texas, Louisiana and Florida, none of which requires a range in a posting.	Requisitions 30205951, 30205962, 30214078, 30207701 and 30218884
F6 Data Solutions	Flat nationwide. $40 – $50 per hour printed in nine states.	Requisitions 5406190008, 5406228008, 5406265008, 5406287008, 5406291008, 5406527008, 5406948008, 5407268008

The Cloudflare pair is the most useful row here, because it is one employer contradicting itself in public on the same day. Requisition 8074364 prints “For Washington D.C. Metro and Washington (Kirkland) based hires: Estimated annual salary of $120,000 – $165,000” and “For Colorado based hires: Estimated annual salary of $98,000 – $135,000”. Requisition 8099671 prints $126,000 to $173,000 for New York City, Washington and Washington DC, and $114,000 to $157,000 for Colorado.

Same company, same two jurisdictions, same week. The Colorado discount is 18.3 percent on one job and 9.5 percent on the other. An employer’s own cost of living factor changes by role. Anyone quoting a single multiplier for a city is quoting something no employer actually uses.

For what a band is worth once local prices are taken out, the data center salary and cost of living comparison does that arithmetic with government price data.

For a state by state view of the market itself, see the data center salary by state comparison.

The silence is also data

Sixty seven postings printed no figure. Pay transparency law explains some of that and not all of it.

T5 Data Centers printed a band on four postings out of 27 read, and all four sit in Illinois or Colorado, both states that require a range in the posting. Its postings in Wyoming, Texas, Kansas, Ohio, North Carolina, Indiana, New Mexico, Missouri and Maryland printed nothing.

Then the counter-examples. TierPoint printed no band on any of the ten postings opened, including postings in New York and Maryland, where a range is required. xAI printed no band on any of eight data center postings. Cologix prints bands in Ohio and British Columbia as a matter of course, where no statute makes it. Carrier prints one band in five states that require nothing.

The honest reading: a posted range exists because a law requires it in some places and because an employer chose to in others, and the two groups overlap badly enough that you cannot predict one from the other.

Data center salary survey versus job postings: why the numbers disagree

Most data center salary figures in circulation trace back to one document: the Data Center Salary Survey 2025 (USA) from DataX Connect. It is a real report with a published method, and the method is the point.

Printed in the report, word for word:

Three things follow from that paragraph, and none of them is a criticism of the firm, which published its method plainly when many do not.

The sample is self-selected and partly built from one recruiter’s own placements. A recruitment firm places senior and specialist people far more often than it places an entry level technician, so the mix leans up the ladder by construction.

The report states “over 1,500 data center professionals across Europe and the USA”. That is a combined figure. The report publishes no US-only respondent count. Its ten state map publishes no respondent count per state either.

The survey date is June 2025. A 2026 edition exists and sits behind a registration form.

Here is what that recruiter sample reports beside what 112 postings printed in October 2026.

What the recruiter survey reports	What the job postings printed	What each one is measuring
US permanent average of $180,951	No single average exists in the census. The middle of Amazon’s facilities manager band is $161,100 and the middle of its two year technician band is about $51.78 an hour	A placement-weighted average of people against a band offered to new hires
Technician average of $92,000	$28 – $35 an hour at Cologix in Columbus, $33 – $38 at ServerFarm, $54,000-$65,000 at T5 for a junior, 37.64 – 65.91 USD hourly at Amazon in Northern Virginia	$92,000 sits above the ceiling of three of those four and inside the fourth
Facilities or Operations Manager average of $171,000	129,200.00 to 193,000.00 USD annually at Amazon in six metros, and 91,800.00 to 137,700.00 in the fourth Boardman posting	$171,000 lands inside the high band and above the entire low one
Commissioning average of $156,223	96,600.00 to 160,000.00 at 3+ years and 116,800.00 to 160,000.00 at 5+ years at Amazon	Both postings share a 160,000 ceiling, so the gap is a level, not a market rate
A ten state ranking from $207,000 down to $151,000	One employer printing one band across eight cities in three states	A ranking of where placements happened against a ranking of where the work is

The verdict

The recruiter survey is not wrong and the postings are not the whole truth. They answer different questions.

A recruiter survey tells you what people who moved jobs through a recruiter are earning, weighted toward the seniority a recruiter gets hired to fill. That is genuinely useful if you are a construction director deciding whether to move.

A posting census tells you what an employer will put in writing, today, to a stranger. That is the number you negotiate against, because it is the number the employer has already committed to in public with a requisition number on it.

If you are pricing your own next role, use the postings. If you are trying to understand where the senior money in the industry sits, the survey is the better instrument. Quoting a $180,951 national average to a technician earning $31 an hour in Columbus helps nobody.

Bonuses, shift pay and benefits in data center jobs

This is where the census comes up short, and the shortfall is worth printing.

Not one of the 112 banded postings printed a bonus percentage. T5 postings say “Bonus eligible”. Mortenson says the role “is eligible for Mortenson’s incentive plan”. Amazon says “Your Amazon package will include sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs)” and prints no dollar figure for either. A reader cannot price any of that.

One number did survive, and it is the most concrete piece of premium pay in the whole count.

Thirteen percent on the top of that band is $8.57 an hour, which is more than the gap between the one year and two year bands.

The differential does not follow the job up the ladder. Amazon requisitions 10555735 and 10529757 are both titled Data Center Facilities Manager (Night Shift) and both print 129,200.00 to 193,000.00 USD annually, which is the same band the day shift postings print. The night premium is paid to the technician and not to the manager.

On benefits, no employer in this census published the value of its plan. Healthcare, retirement match and holiday allowance were described and never priced.

The job titles employers actually use

Searching the wrong phrase costs more money than negotiating badly. The census counted exact title phrases across 860 postings on seven boards.

Exact phrase in the title	Where it appears	Where it appears zero times
Data Center Engineering Operations	Amazon, as a core title	Zero times in all 860 postings on T5, ServerFarm, Cologix, TierPoint, Cloudflare, xAI and F6
Data Center Technician	13 of 43 at ServerFarm, 9 of 24 at Cologix	0 of 94 at T5, 0 of 18 at TierPoint, 0 of 24 at F6, zero in the Cloudflare and xAI data center sets
Critical Facilities Technician	18 of 94 at T5, 7 of 43 at ServerFarm	0 of 24 at Cologix, 0 of 18 at TierPoint, 0 of 24 at F6
Facilities Manager	9 of 94 at T5	0 at ServerFarm, Cologix, TierPoint and F6
HVAC Technician	3 of 43 at ServerFarm, 1 at xAI	0 of 94 at T5, 0 of 24 at Cologix, 0 of 18 at TierPoint, and 0 of 24 at F6, which titles every posting HVAC Field Service Technician instead
Security Officer	3 of 24 at Cologix	0 of 94 at T5, 0 of 43 at ServerFarm, 0 of 18 at TierPoint, 0 of 24 at F6

TierPoint is the clearest case. Across 18 postings it uses none of those six phrases. Its technicians are titled Operations Technician I and II and MEP Technician II. Anyone searching “data center technician” sees zero TierPoint jobs and would reasonably conclude the company is not hiring.

The practical move: search three or four titles for the same job, every time. For the facilities side that means data center facilities manager salary as well as the manager title, and for the mechanical side it means data center HVAC technician salary rather than the generic phrase.

Hiring and retention in the data center industry in 2026

Two government and industry releases are current enough to quote, and both carry a sample size and a date.

The Uptime Institute Global Data Center Survey 2026, published July 2026, reports that 53 percent of operators have difficulty finding qualified candidates for vacant roles, up from 46 percent in 2025, on a sample of 607 for that question. More than a quarter, 28 percent, say staff were hired away by competitors, and one in ten report employees leaving the data center business altogether.

The same survey reports the biggest skills gaps in electrical roles at 38 percent, junior level operations at 38 percent, operations management at 35 percent and mechanical at 34 percent. The electrical gap has grown 13 percentage points since 2023.

On the demand side, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics projects the computing infrastructure providers, data processing, web hosting and related services industry to grow 25.1 percent and add 120,400 jobs between 2025 and 2035, in release USDL-26-1422, published August 27, 2026. Construction as a whole is projected to add 410,700 jobs over the same period, a 5.0 percent increase, in BLS Table 2.11.

One warning about BLS and this industry. There is no federal occupation code for any data center job. The May 2025 occupation list at the BLS occupation list contains zero titles with the phrase “data center” in them. BLS measures the industry, which is real and quoted above. Any figure presented as the BLS wage for a data center technician has been assembled from something else.

Every employer and source named in this report

• Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud division and the largest single source of readable data center postings in this census.
• T5 Data Centers, which posts under the EverOn facilities brand on the Lever applicant tracking system.
• ServerFarm, a data center owner and operator with sites in Washington, California, Texas, Georgia and Ontario.
• Cologix, a North American interconnection and colocation operator.
• TierPoint, a colocation and managed services operator hiring on the iCIMS platform.
• Cloudflare, a network and security company that runs its own data center estate.
• xAI, which is staffing data center operations in Memphis, Tennessee and Hillsboro, Oregon.
• Carrier, a cooling equipment manufacturer whose field service arm carries union chiller technician postings.
• F6 Data Solutions, an HVAC service contractor working inside data centers in ten states.
• Black & Veatch, an engineering and construction firm, and the most transparent design side employer found, printing state specific bands and requisition numbers.
• M. A. Mortenson Company, a general contractor, and the only employer in this census that publishes its own geographic pay uplift schedule on the posting.
• Uptime Institute, publisher of the annual Global Data Center Survey, 2026 edition, July 2026.
• US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), publisher of the Employment Projections programme, 2025 to 2035 cycle, released August 27, 2026.
• DataX Connect, a data center recruitment firm and publisher of the Data Center Salary Survey 2025 (USA), survey date June 2025.
• North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) 518, computing infrastructure providers, data processing, web hosting and related services, the code BLS uses to measure this industry.
• Greenhouse, Lever, iCIMS and SAP SuccessFactors, the four applicant tracking systems that render their postings publicly and therefore made this count possible at all.

What this survey could not measure

Naming the holes is the only thing that makes the rest of the numbers worth anything.

• Every Workday employer. Flexential, STACK, QTS, Aligned, JLL, CBRE, Stantec, Jacobs and AECOM all host on a platform that cannot be read. A meaningful share of the US market is missing from this count and there is no way to say which direction that biases it.
• Equinix, Digital Realty, Google, Microsoft and Meta. None produced a readable, currently open posting with a printed band on October 4, 2026.
• Total compensation. Amazon prints a base band and names restricted stock units and sign-on payments without pricing either. Every equity figure is therefore absent.
• Bonus size. Zero of 112 banded postings printed a bonus percentage.
• What current staff earn. A posting is an offer to a new hire. Nobody publishes an internal pay table.
• Any clearance premium. Three Amazon postings require a TS/SCI with polygraph. None prints a figure for it.
• Overtime. Hourly bands are printed without an expected hours figure, so no honest annual conversion exists.

Where no primary document publishes a number, this page leaves the space empty rather than filling it with an estimate.

Add your salary to the dcgeeks 2026 data center salary survey

The census above counts what employers print. It cannot count what you are actually paid, and those two numbers are not the same.

The form below collects anonymous pay data from people working in the industry. It takes about five minutes.

Two things stated plainly. No figure anywhere on this page came from this form. No reader submitted results have been published yet, and none will be published as a figure until there are enough responses to say what the sample is and where it came from, the same disclosure this page asks of everybody else.

The bottom line on data center pay in 2026

Four things came out of reading 179 postings in one day.

A national average is the least useful number in this industry. One employer printed a 40 percent spread for one title in one Oregon town, wider than the gap between the best and worst paying states in the survey everybody quotes.

Geography matters far less than the job does. Amazon printed identical pay for Portland, Ohio and Northern Virginia on one requisition. The money moves when the work moves, from running a building to building one.

The title you search decides what you see. Six common job titles each returned zero across whole boards. TierPoint uses none of them.

The number you negotiate against is the one with a requisition number on it. Every band on this page has one. Open it, read the qualifications, and work out which end of the band your experience puts you at.

For the national picture by role, start with the data center technician salary guide.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the average data center salary in 2026?

No honest single average exists. Job postings read on October 4, 2026 ranged from $20 an hour for a junior technician in Houston to $284,736 for a senior electrical engineer in Arlington, Virginia. Pay is set by the role and the employer, not by a national figure.

How much does a data center technician make in 2026?

Employers printed $28 to $35 an hour in Columbus, Ohio, $33 to $38 in Moses Lake, Washington, and 37.64 to 65.91 USD hourly in Northern Virginia on Amazon requisition 10537803. Entry roles with no experience required started at $54,000 a year.

Which US state pays data center workers the most?

The census found no reliable state ranking. Amazon printed one band, 37.64 to 65.91 USD hourly, across Ohio, Oregon and six Virginia cities on a single requisition. One employer varied pay inside one Oregon town by 40 percent, which is wider than any published state gap.

Do data center workers get bonuses in 2026?

Employers say yes and almost never print a number. None of the 112 postings with a pay band published a bonus percentage. Amazon names sign-on payments and restricted stock units without pricing them. One premium is printed numerically: a 13 percent night shift differential.

Does Amazon pay more for night shift in a data center?

Yes, for technicians. Six Amazon Data Center Engineering Operations Technician requisitions print “Night Shift Differential: 13% additional pay (6:00pm – 6:00am shifts)”. Two Data Center Facilities Manager postings titled Night Shift print the same band as the day shift postings, with no differential.

How is the dcgeeks 2026 data center salary survey different?

It counts documents instead of opinions. On October 4, 2026 dcgeeks opened 179 live job postings by hand across 11 employers and recorded exactly what each one printed, with the requisition number beside every figure. Sixty seven postings printed nothing, and that is reported too.

Why do salary surveys and job postings give different numbers?

They measure different things. A recruiter survey averages people who changed jobs through that recruiter, which leans senior. A posting census records what an employer will commit to in writing for a new hire. The second is the figure you negotiate against.

Is there a BLS salary figure for data center jobs?

No. The federal occupation list for May 2025 contains zero titles with the phrase “data center” in them. BLS measures the industry, projecting 25.1 percent growth and 120,400 added jobs from 2025 to 2035. Any BLS wage presented as data center specific was built from something else.

How many data center jobs will be created by 2035?

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics projects 120,400 new jobs in computing infrastructure, data processing, web hosting and related services between 2025 and 2035, a 25.1 percent increase, in release USDL-26-1422 dated August 27, 2026. Construction overall is projected to add 410,700 jobs.