The big demand for analytics, data mining, and data science professionals led to a significant jump in their salaries in 2013. Salaries are highest in US, Australia/NZ, and among self-employed and industry data scientists. See details.
The 2013 KDnuggets Annual Salary Poll asked
What is your annual salary/income range (in USD) and employment ?
The big demand for data scientists led to a significant jump in overall compensation in 2013, including 12% increase globally, 13% increase in US/Canada, and 29% increase among self-employed.
About 80% of the respondents were from companies or were self-employed.
US and AU/NZ lead in salaries, with Western Europe and Middle East forming a strong second tier.
The following graph shows the overall landscape of analytics compensation:
Graph 1: Analytics Salary/Income by Region and Employment type
excluding students and unemployed.
Not surprisingly, the income/salary was highest among self-employed, followed by data scientists working for a company, University/Academia, Government, and students - see table 1.
Table 1: 2013 Annual Income/Salary by Employment type
| Employment |
2013 Avg. Salary | 2012 Avg. Salary | % Change |
2013 Count | 2012 Count |
|---|
| Self-employed | 136.4 |
105.8 | 29.0% | 25 | 26 |
| Company | 111.3 |
101.6 | 9.5% | 284 | 375 |
| University/Academia | 89.6 |
63.2 | 41.9% | 42 | 49 |
| Government | 72.5 |
71.8 | 1.0% | 12 | 14 |
| Student | 33.4 |
34.1 | -2.0% | 19 | 17 |
| Unemployed/Retired | 20.0 |
48.3 | na | 1 | 6 |
| All | 105.2 |
94.1 | 11.9% | 383 | 487 |
For estimating average salary we used mid-point of the range, 20K for "< $30K" range,
and $250K for "> $180" range.
We note also that there was only 1 self-reported Unemployed/Retired, vs 6 in 2012.
In Table 2 we break down the data by region. Since the numbers of self-employed and government data scientists are relatively small, we grouped them with industry and university, respectively. Students and unemployed were excluded.
Table 2: 2013 Annual Income/Salary by Region and Employment type
excluding students and unemployed; % change is not reported when counts are too small
| Region | Employment |
2013 Avg. Salary | 2012 Avg. Salary | % Change | 2013 Count |
|---|
| US/Canada | all | 128.8 | 113.9 | 13.1% | 223 |
| | Comp/Self | 131.3 |
116.8 | 12.4% | 194 |
| | Univ/Gov | 112.1 |
85.9 | 30.5% | 29 |
| Australia/NZ | all | 108.1 | 111.8 | -3.3% | 8 |
| | Comp/Self | 112.9 |
108.3 | 4.2% | 7 |
| | Univ/Gov | 75.0 |
127.5 | na | 1 |
| W. Europe | all | 85.1 | 78.1 | 8.9% | 75 |
| | Comp/Self | 90.4 |
83.8 | 7.9% | 62 |
| | Univ/Gov | 59.6 |
55.6 | 7.2% | 13 |
Middle East/
Africa | all | 83.5 |
96.4 | -13.4% | 13 |
| | Comp/Self | 90.5 |
105 | -13.9% | 11 |
| | Univ/Gov | 45.0 |
45 | na | 2 |
| Latin America | all | 68.3 |
43.3 | 57.7% | 12 |
| | Comp/Self | 68.8 |
43.3 | 58.7% | 8 |
| | Univ/Gov | 67.5 |
na | na | 4 |
| Asia | all | 59.8 |
41.3 | 44.9% | 23 |
| | Comp/Self | 63.3 |
45.2 | 39.9% | 20 |
| | Univ/Gov | 36.7 |
29.4 | 24.8% | 3 |
| E. Europe | all | 43.9 |
40.8 | 7.5% | 9 |
| | Comp/Self | 47.1 |
45 | 4.8% | 7 |
| | Univ/Gov | 32.5 |
30.7 | 5.8% | 2 |
| Global | all | 109.2 |
96.8 | 12.8% | 363 |
The following graph shows a more detailed breakdown by salary range and region.
| 
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