Data Analyst Salary in Houston — 2026 BLS Data
Salary distribution
Percentile breakdown of Data Analyst base salaries in Houston.
Data analyst salary in Houston comes in at a $100,420 median base — that’s BLS OEWS May 2024 data for the Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands metro, SOC 15-2051. The 25th-to-90th-percentile band runs from $80,250 to $164,300, a spread that reflects Houston’s unusually layered employer mix: energy supermajors, downstream petrochemical firms, large hospital systems, NASA contractors, and a growing financial services corridor. Strip out the upstream energy operators and Big Three healthcare networks, and the median would drop 10-15%. Include them, and you get a city where a Python-fluent analyst five years out of school can comfortably earn $125K before any negotiation.
What the median hides
The $100,420 BLS median is base salary only, collected from employers via the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey. It does not include bonuses, profit-sharing, field differentials, or equity. For Houston, that omission matters more than it does in most cities.
Energy companies — particularly supermajors like Shell, ExxonMobil, BP, and ConocoPhillips, all of which run major Houston operations — structure analyst compensation around a base plus an annual bonus that ranges from 8% to 20% of salary depending on company performance and individual rating. At Chevron Phillips Chemical’s corporate headquarters in The Woodlands, mid-level data analyst positions carry published bonus targets of 12-15%. That adds $12,000-$18,000 to a $120,000 base, putting total cash comfortably above $135,000 for someone with four to six years of experience.
Health systems skew the distribution in the other direction. The Texas Medical Center — the largest medical complex in the world by number of institutions, employing roughly 106,000 people — hires large cohorts of data analysts for clinical reporting, revenue cycle, and quality metrics. These roles cluster in the $72,000-$92,000 range, rarely carry performance bonuses above 5%, and have no equity. They fill the lower half of the BLS distribution and anchor the 25th percentile closer to $80,000 than a pure tech-sector reading would suggest.
The practical lesson: two candidates who both land “Data Analyst, Houston” titles can be in very different situations financially. The one building production dashboards for a refinery operations team at LyondellBasell is on a different comp trajectory than the one building clinical outcome reports at a TMC hospital — even if both report the same base at the time of hire.
How Houston compares to other Texas hubs
Texas does not have a state income tax, which means every comparison to California, New York, or Illinois needs a post-tax adjustment. That adjustment is worth roughly $8,000-$12,000 per year at data analyst income levels compared to California, and about $6,000-$9,000 versus New York State.
Within Texas, Austin now slightly outpaces Houston on headline base for data analysts. Austin’s tech concentration — Dell, Apple, Meta, Tesla, Oracle, and a deep bench of venture-backed SaaS companies — pulls its DA median to around $106,000-$112,000. Dallas sits close to Houston, with a median of roughly $98,000-$102,000. San Antonio trails both, with TMC-equivalent health system weight pulling its median down around $85,000.
The more interesting comparison is Houston versus San Francisco. Bay Area data analyst median base runs approximately $130,000-$140,000 — a 30-40% nominal premium over Houston. Adjust for the Bay Area’s cost-of-living index of roughly 180 versus Houston’s 94, and the purchasing-power gap reverses. A Houston analyst at $100,000 controls more disposable income after housing, taxes, and cost of living than a San Francisco analyst at $135,000. This is the structural argument Houston companies use to attract talent from coastal markets, and it holds up in the arithmetic.
Seattle ($108,000 median DA base) and Boston ($102,000) are closer to Houston nominally but both carry COL indexes in the 130-150 range, widening the real-dollar gap further in Houston’s favor.
What drives the spread: company tier, level, and specialty
The 84-point gap between Houston’s p25 ($80,250) and p90 ($164,300) comes from three overlapping drivers.
Company tier and sector. Analyst roles at E&P (exploration and production) companies and energy trading desks sit near the top of the Houston pay scale. Analysts at commodity trading arms — BP’s trading division, Trafigura’s Americas desk, Gunvor — can command $130,000-$155,000 base at the mid-senior level, reflecting the financial-services characteristics of those roles. Tech companies with Houston engineering presences (Hewlett Packard Enterprise, HP Inc., Oracle’s energy vertical) pay in the $105,000-$125,000 range. Government contractors supporting NASA’s Johnson Space Center tend to pay GS-equivalent rates, around $85,000-$105,000. Enterprise and retail roles (HEB, Academy Sports, Sysco, which is headquartered in Houston) sit in the middle, $85,000-$110,000.
Level and years of experience. Entry-level (0-2 years) DA roles in Houston post in the $62,000-$80,000 range — still well above the $48,000-$55,000 national starting range for liberal-arts graduates because the local employer pool skews toward firms with money. Mid-level (3-6 years) runs $90,000-$120,000. Senior analysts (6+ years, or those owning a product domain and mentoring junior staff) clear $120,000-$145,000 at most employers. Staff and Principal-level DA titles, most common at energy supermajors and large fintechs, reach $145,000-$165,000 and account for the BLS p90.
Specialty and toolstack. The single largest salary premium in Houston data analytics is upstream or midstream energy domain knowledge — understanding SCADA data, wellbore production decline curves, pipeline throughput metrics, or commodity pricing models. Analysts who combine SQL/Python fluency with genuine energy domain expertise routinely earn 20-30% above generalist peers at the same experience level. The second premium is geospatial analytics, which is relevant everywhere from oilfield asset management to port logistics and urban planning at Harris County. ArcGIS and Python-based spatial analysis skills add roughly $8,000-$12,000 to market rate. BI-focused analysts whose primary deliverable is Tableau or Power BI dashboards without underlying SQL or statistical modeling sit 10-15% below generalists who write production code.
Total comp breakdown
BLS captures base salary. A realistic total-comp picture for Houston data analysts:
Energy sector, mid-level (4-6 years experience):
- Base: $110,000-$125,000
- Annual performance bonus (8-15% target): $9,000-$19,000
- 401(k) match (4-5% of base, generous by market standards): $4,400-$6,250
- No equity at most public energy companies; some private E&P firms offer carried interest or phantom equity on material events
- Total cash: $119,000-$144,000
Health system or TMC, mid-level:
- Base: $78,000-$92,000
- Bonus (3-5% if any): $2,300-$4,600
- Total cash: $80,000-$97,000
Tech or SaaS company (Houston presence):
- Base: $100,000-$120,000
- Bonus (10-15%): $10,000-$18,000
- RSU grant (annualized over 4-year vest): $5,000-$20,000
- Total comp: $115,000-$158,000
Profit-sharing is more common in Houston than in most US metros — it’s a legacy of energy company culture. At some midstream and downstream firms, profit-sharing payouts in strong commodity years can add $5,000-$15,000 beyond the stated bonus target, which is why tracking down actual payout history matters when evaluating an offer.
COL-adjusted purchasing power
Houston’s cost-of-living index sits at approximately 94, six points below the national baseline of 100 (C2ER Cost of Living Index, 2025 Annual Average). Housing is the key driver — Houston metro median home price is roughly 30% below the national median, and median apartment rent runs about 20% below national average. Combined with zero state income tax, a $100,000 Houston data analyst salary has the purchasing power equivalent of approximately $130,000-$140,000 in San Francisco or New York City after adjusting for cost of living and state/local taxes.
Run the numbers concretely. A Houston analyst earning $100,420 pays federal income tax but zero state income tax. Net take-home after federal tax and standard FICA deductions is roughly $74,000-$77,000 per year. A median one-bedroom apartment in the Houston loop runs $1,400-$1,600/month, leaving significant room for savings or debt payoff — a contrast to the same exercise run in Austin ($1,700-$2,000/month for a comparable unit) or Denver ($1,800-$2,100/month).
The flip side of Houston’s low COL: the salary ceiling in most non-energy sectors is lower than in coastal tech markets. A senior data analyst topping out at $145,000 in Houston faces a real ceiling without moving into energy, management, or data engineering. In the Bay Area or New York, FAANG-tier senior DA roles reach $200,000-$230,000 total comp at comparable experience levels. Houston’s comparative advantage is the middle of the distribution — the $85,000-$130,000 range where purchasing power is genuinely superior — not the very top end.
Three-lever negotiation playbook
Houston data analyst negotiations have specific features worth knowing before you sit down with HR.
Lever 1: Break out the bonus and get the historical payout range. Houston energy and industrial employers frequently post roles with base salaries that look modest on paper — $95,000 versus a tech company offering $110,000. The right question is not “can you go higher on base?” but “what has the actual bonus payout been at this level over the last three years, and was target bonus ever achieved in full?” At a mid-size refiner in a strong commodity year, a 15% target bonus gets paid in full, making the effective cash comp $109,250. At a tech company in a flat year, the 12% target gets reduced to 6%, and suddenly the base premium evaporates. Get the historical range in writing or ask the recruiter for the last three years of average payout percentages at the offered grade level.
Lever 2: Use the no-state-income-tax advantage both ways. If you are negotiating with a Texas employer while holding an out-of-state offer from California or New York, the no-state-income-tax argument runs in both directions. A California offer at $125,000 nets roughly $91,000 after state tax (9.3% at that bracket). A Houston offer at $108,000 nets roughly $80,000-$82,000 after federal only. That gap is real, but it’s about $9,000-$11,000 annually — not the $17,000 nominal gap suggests. Use that math to push the Houston offer toward $115,000-$118,000 base, which makes the take-home comparison essentially neutral and removes any financial justification for relocating to California.
Conversely, if you are in Houston and interviewing with a remote-first company that geo-adjusts pay, push back on any downward adjustment that references Texas as a lower-cost market. Houston is below national average on housing but above average for median data analyst earnings within the state, and the energy-sector labor market exerts upward pressure on all analyst comp citywide.
Lever 3: Price in the domain knowledge premium before you get an offer. If you have energy sector experience — SCADA, production data, trading analytics, HSE reporting, any upstream/midstream domain — quantify it explicitly in your resume and pre-offer conversations. Companies like Halliburton, Schlumberger (SLB), Enterprise Products Partners, and Kinder Morgan run their own internal salary bands for analysts with domain expertise, separate from generalist analyst grades. If you let yourself get slotted into the generalist grade, you will spend your first 12 months trying to get a market-adjustment correction. Instead, ask during the screening call whether they have a technical or domain specialist track, and request the job grade that corresponds to energy analytics before any number is put on the table. This single move is worth $10,000-$20,000 in base at many Houston energy employers — the difference between being paid as someone who learned the domain versus someone they do not need to spend 6 months training.
Data caveats
The BLS OEWS does not use “Data Analyst” as a standalone SOC code. Houston data analyst salaries here are drawn from SOC 15-2051 (Data Scientists), which includes data analysts, BI analysts, and data scientists within a single classification. The BLS added 15-2051 in the 2018 SOC revision partly to capture the data analyst role type, but some analyst titles still get classified under 13-1199 (Business Operations Specialists) or 15-2031 (Operations Research Analysts) depending on how employers report to the survey. The percentiles above are the cleanest available government proxy for data analyst comp in the Houston metro but inherit some noise from adjacent job families.
BLS OEWS collects data from establishments across a rolling three-year reference period, with the May 2024 release reflecting the most recent survey year. The figures are therefore a weighted average across that window, not a snapshot of today’s labor market. Houston’s energy sector saw notable hiring acceleration in 2022-2023 on high commodity prices, with some cooling in 2024-2025 as oil prices normalized around $70-80/barrel — current DA salaries at energy companies may be slightly below the 2022-2023 peaks even if they remain above the BLS survey midpoint.
For active job searches, cross-reference the BLS numbers against recent postings on Indeed and LinkedIn with explicit salary ranges — Texas has no salary transparency law, so employers are not required to disclose ranges, but many do voluntarily. Postings that show ranges tend to cluster 5-12% above the BLS p50 for comparable titles, consistent with the observed gap between government survey data and self-reported market data in other US metros.
Tracking your applications, offers, and comp data in a structured way makes the negotiation math above actionable rather than theoretical. OfferFlow’s job tracker lets you log offer details, compare compensation components across competing offers, and see the full picture before you respond to HR — useful when you’re juggling multiple energy-sector and tech offers simultaneously.