How much does a Data Engineer make?

The median Data Engineer salary is $147,250 per year, from 204 job postings that disclosed pay across 99 companies in September 2026. Most fall between $113,086 and $180,000.

Which companies pay Data Engineers the most?

Of employers with at least three open Data Engineer postings, Google posted the highest median range at $229,500.

Do remote Data Engineer jobs pay less?

In this sample remote-eligible postings had a median of $151,000 against $147,250 for onsite — 2.5% more.

What skills do Data Engineer jobs require?

Across 300 Data Engineer posting descriptions read in September 2026, the most frequently required were: SQL, Python, AWS, Azure, Data Pipelines. The top one appears in 66% of postings.

Data Engineer Skills and Job Description (September 2026)

Name: Data Engineer salary data, September 2026
Creator: FitToHire

SQL is asked for by 66% of Data Engineer employers, the most common requirement across 300 live postings read in September 2026. Then Python, AWS, Azure.

Median posted pay is $147,250, most postings between $113,086 and $180,000 — from 204 postings that disclosed it, across 99 companies.

Posted pay is up 8.3% since 2026-09-08 ($136,000 → $147,250).

Check your résumé against these →

These are ranges employers published in their own job postings — not salaries people typed into a form years ago.

What Data Engineer postings actually ask for

Ranked by how many of the 300 posting descriptions mention them.

SQL 66%

Python 59%

AWS 36%

Azure 31%

Data Pipelines 31%

Data Modeling 30%

Snowflake 27%

Spark 24%

Git 24%

Databricks 23%

ETL 22%

Data Quality 20%

Java 20%

DBT 19%

Airflow 19%

Agile 18%

CI/CD 18%

Oracle 17%

PostgreSQL 16%

Terraform 16%

GCP 14%

Data Science 14%

Data Governance 14%

Information Systems 13%

Kubernetes 13%

Would your background clear the bar?

These are the requirements Data Engineer postings list. Paste one of those postings and your résumé — FitToHire checks you against every requirement and shows the evidence behind each verdict.

15 companies in this sample have Data Engineer postings open right now.

Check your fit →

What Data Engineers earn

10th $97K 25th $113K median $147K 75th $180K 90th $212K

$86K $227K

Each bar is a pay band. Height is how many of the 99 employers who published a salary fall in it, counted once each.

Pay bands in numbers

Employer median pay by band
Pay band	Employers
$85,500–$99,650	14
$99,650–$113,800	12
$113,800–$127,950	10
$127,950–$142,100	11
$142,100–$156,250	10
$156,250–$170,400	12
$170,400–$184,550	11
$184,550–$198,700	6
$198,700–$212,850	4
$212,850–$227,000	9
Total	99

Data Engineer vs adjacent roles

Roles people compare this one against, taken from what they search.

data scientist
data analyst
data architect
software engineer
analytics engineer
ml engineer

Who is hiring Data Engineers

15 companies with open postings in this sample.

Google

$229,500 3

Information Technology Senior Management Forum

$223,750 7

Apple

$213,350 10

ServiceNow

$206,000 6

HAZEL

$177,500 3

The Hartford

$168,800 3

vertage

$161,200 7

Blu Omega LLC

$157,500 4

AAA Northeast

$151,000 6

Schupan

$139,000 4

Also hiring: Deloitte, Amazon.com, Capital One, Intercontinental Exchange, Capgemini, Adoreal, General Motors (GM), Hitachi Rail, Booz Allen Hamilton.

Remote vs onsite pay

Median of remote-eligible postings against the rest.

Remote-eligible

$151,000

Onsite

$147,250

61 remote-eligible postings against 145 onsite. Remote pays 2.5% more in this sample.

Pay by experience level

Level is taken from the posting title, so only postings that state one are counted.

Mid

$105,950 16

Senior

$154,980 70

Lead / Manager

$188,025 14

Principal / Staff

$200,000 13

Pay by location

Metros with at least three salaried postings.

New York, NY

$177,500 15

$161,200 11

Austin, TX

$184,950 11

Remote, US

$145,000 10

Chicago, IL

$120,750 6

Seattle, WA

$155,450 6

McLean, VA

$202,250 5

Ashburn, VA

$157,500 5

Dallas, TX

$160,000 5

Richmond, VA

$156,000 5

Cupertino, CA

$178,300 5

San Francisco, CA

$206,875 4

Where this data comes from

300 live postings analysed
204 (68%) published a salary range
82 (27%) were remote-eligible
148 distinct employers
Requirements read from 300 full posting descriptions
Each employer gets one vote in the median, so a company running a large hiring campaign cannot move it
Ranges are converted to annual figures; hourly and contract postings are normalised before comparison

How the requirements were read

Requirements are not keyword counts. Each posting is read by our extraction engine, which works out what the employer is actually asking for and separates a requirement from a section heading or a line of boilerplate. Two postings asking for the same thing in different words are counted once, because our skills graph knows which phrasings mean the same thing and which imply others.

The share beside each requirement is the percentage of distinct EMPLOYERS in that sample who asked for it, counted one vote per company so a firm posting the same role many times cannot inflate its own requirements. Measured, not estimated, and read from the posting text rather than counted as keywords.

Because every reading is dated, the movement figures above are real month-over-month change. Sites built on self-reported salaries cannot produce that number: their data has no posting date.