NOC Engineer Salary 2026,
What NOC Engineers Actually Earn

How much do noc engineers make in 2026?

NOC engineers are counted in the BLS network and computer systems administrators series: OEWS May 2025 puts SOC 15-1244 at a national median of $99,130 a year ($47.66 an hour), with the bottom 10% near $62,640 and the top 10% at $155,050. That series pools network operations centre staff with systems and network administrators generally, so it is a broad technical band and NOC roles typically sit in its lower and middle portions. The role is monitoring and first-line restoration: watching alarms and performance across a network, triaging incidents, executing runbooks, coordinating field dispatch and vendor escalation, and communicating status during outages. Its two defining features are shift work, since networks are monitored around the clock, and a strong dependence on what the employer expects the role to be. In some organisations NOC engineers troubleshoot deeply, write automation, and progress quickly into network engineering. In others the role is script-following with escalation to a separate team, and offers little technical growth. That difference determines whether the NOC is a launchpad or a trap, and it is visible in the interview if you ask what the team is allowed to change. Employment across the pooled series is projected to decline 4.2% through 2034, with roughly 14,300 openings a year. → Full noc engineer career guide, career path, credentials & placement →

Note: $99,130 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 15-1244, 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.

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