GIS Analyst Salary 2026,
What GIS Analysts Actually Earn

How much do gis analysts make in 2026?

GIS analysts are counted in the BLS cartographers and photogrammetrists series: OEWS May 2025 gives SOC 17-1021 a national median of $81,390 a year ($39.13 an hour), with the bottom 10% near $53,740 and the top 10% at $126,950. The series is small — 14,260 workers — and does not capture the whole profession, because many people doing GIS work are recorded under surveying, urban planning, environmental science or data analysis codes depending on their employer. Treat the band as a reasonable centre of gravity rather than a complete picture. Within GIS, one distinction dominates pay: whether you use the software or extend it. Analysts who produce maps, maintain datasets and run standard spatial analysis in a desktop application sit around and below the median, and that work is increasingly automated. Analysts who write Python against spatial libraries, build data pipelines, work with spatial databases and serve web mapping applications are doing software engineering with a geospatial specialism, and they sit at the top of this band and frequently above it. Industry matters too: utilities, telecommunications and energy pay above municipal government for the same nominal role, because their spatial data is directly operational. Employment is projected to grow 6.4% through 2034 with roughly 1,000 openings a year. → Full gis analyst career guide, career path, credentials & placement →

Note: $81,390 blends every experience level and every setting in this occupation. For pay by level alone, see Pay by Level below.

Published (BLS): BLS OEWS May 2025, SOC 17-1021, United States national estimate. Public, methodologically rigorous, but sampled on a rolling 3-year basis and published ~10 months after collection — so it reflects wages that are already 1–2 years old by the time you read them.

Level and certification medians: distributed across the published BLS percentile range for this SOC code (P10 through P90) according to the credential tiers this occupation actually hires at. They are modeled reference points, not separately surveyed wages.

State and metro figures: modeled — the BLS national median multiplied by the GlobalCybers state wage index, and for metros by the published metro index for that state. They are estimates of local pay, not BLS state or metropolitan-area observations, and are labelled as modeled in the tables below.

No verified placement sample:GlobalCybers does not yet publish a placement median for this role, so no "verified" figure appears anywhere on this page.

Full site methodology & data sources →