Last updated: November 13, 2026
By Tom Kenaley, President and Senior Partner, KORE1
Data governance analysts earn about $85,000 to $155,000 in base salary in 2026, with the seat’s mandate and reporting line deciding where in that range an offer lands. Salary trackers read on November 13 put the average for the title anywhere from $68,467 to $147,339. That is a $78,872 spread for one job title.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes no pay line for this job, so every tracker is working from self-reported titles. The title covers two jobs.
Here’s how I read it. A data governance analyst is a compliance job and a data job at once, and the federal government prices those two jobs $58,770 apart at the median. Whichever one an employer files the seat under sets the pay scale it gets graded on. Our data governance analyst staffing team fills both kinds of seat, and if you’re writing the req rather than the budget, how to hire a data governance analyst covers that side. This page is just about the number. The interview has its own page: what a data governance analyst should be asked.
We get paid when these seats get filled. So every figure below carries the date it was read and a link. Check them.
Data Governance Analyst Salary in Federal Data
A data governance analyst writes and enforces the rules for how a company classifies, documents, secures, and retains its data, from the business glossary to the access-approval path. What the job pays depends on whether the employer treats those rules as a compliance function or as part of the data platform.
O*NET, the Labor Department’s occupation database, has no code for it. Search “data governance” on O*NET OnLine and Data Warehousing Specialists (15-1243.01) and Database Architects (15-1243.00) come up first, and BLS only publishes wages for the parent, database architects. That’s the data side. The other side is compliance, because a lot of what the analyst produces ends up as evidence in somebody else’s audit.
Here are the federal lines on either side, from the May 2025 release.
| Occupation (SOC code) | Jobs | 25th percentile | Median | 75th percentile | 90th percentile |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Compliance officers (13-1041) | 417,070 | $61,280 | $80,730 | $109,010 | $133,720 |
| Management analysts (13-1111) | 898,280 | $77,950 | $101,860 | $133,370 | $171,640 |
| Database administrators (15-1242) | 69,990 | $79,610 | $104,620 | $135,460 | $163,320 |
| Data scientists (15-2051) | 262,440 | $85,660 | $120,230 | $158,880 | $199,130 |
| Database architects (15-1243) | 67,140 | $109,370 | $139,500 | $169,290 | $204,000 |
| All occupations (for scale) | 155,495,730 | $37,590 | $50,980 | $80,520 | $128,560 |
Source: BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, national estimates for May 2025, retrieved through the BLS public data API on November 13, 2026.
Read compliance officers against database architects. One has an $80,730 median. The other has $139,500. A seat graded as the first and a seat graded as the second sit $58,770 apart before anybody has negotiated a dollar.
BLS counts 417,070 compliance officers and 67,140 database architects, and neither is quite the job, though both get used as somebody’s benchmark for it.
Data Governance Analyst Salary by Source
Four trackers publish a figure for the exact title. All four were read on November 13, 2026, and they don’t measure the same thing, so the last column says which pay basis each one uses.
| Tracker | Average shown | Range shown | Sample | Pay basis |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Payscale | $68,467 | $49,000 to $98,000 (10th to 90th) | 15 profiles, updated September 1, 2026 | Base salary |
| Talent.com | $106,988 (median) | $66,451 to $173,640 | Stated as 10,000 salaries | Annual salary |
| ZipRecruiter | $113,939 | $84,500 to $139,500 (25th to 75th) | Not published | Annual pay |
| Glassdoor | $147,339 | $113,430 to $193,208 (25th to 75th) | 337 salaries | Total pay, base plus additional |
Set those beside the federal table and a pattern shows up. Payscale lands $12,263 under compliance. Glassdoor lands $7,839 over architects. ZipRecruiter sits in the gap, $33,209 above one and $25,561 below the other.
I can’t prove that’s why the trackers disagree, because none of them says who is in its sample. It fits. It isn’t established. What I can say is that fifteen profiles is a small number, and Glassdoor’s 337 are a different crowd.
If you read our August hiring guide, you’ll remember Glassdoor at $132,096 and Salary.com at $70,244. Glassdoor reads $147,339 now, and the page doesn’t say whether it changed its method or its sample. Salary.com threw up a human-check page when we tried it on November 13, so it’s out of the table.
What the Trackers Can’t Tell Apart
ZipRecruiter shows $113,939 for analysts. Same figure for the manager. The 25th percentile is $84,500 on both pages, the 75th is $139,500 on both, and the Los Angeles figure is $122,771 on both. I don’t know why. The page doesn’t explain it, and I’d rather tell you that than hand you a theory.
Glassdoor splits the titles, sort of. Analyst at $147,339, specialist at $146,740, manager at $172,098. The analyst-to-specialist gap is $599.
Payscale goes the other direction, and it’s the oddest of the three. Its data steward average is $80,498 on 81 profiles, $12,031 above its data governance analyst average of $68,467 on 15, and since a steward usually runs the program the analyst designed, that’s backwards.
| Title | Payscale | Glassdoor | ZipRecruiter |
|---|---|---|---|
| Data governance analyst | $68,467 (15 profiles) | $147,339 (337 salaries) | $113,939 |
| Data governance manager | $92,432 (10 profiles) | $172,098 (179 salaries) | $113,939 |
| Data steward | $80,498 (81 profiles) | $108,833 (423 salaries) | $75,411 |
One tracker can’t separate an analyst from a manager. A second puts a steward above an analyst. A third has the analyst within $599 of a specialist. When that happens, the title isn’t what’s setting the price. The seat is.
Pay by Seat: Who Grades the Job
Picture a regional bank in the Carolinas with two openings, same title, same quarter. I built it as an illustration rather than pulling it from a client file, so don’t go looking for the bank, even though the grading mechanism it shows is real. One seat reported to the chief data officer, got graded in the data job family, and came with a band of roughly $118,000 to $152,000. The other reported to the chief compliance officer, got graded in the compliance family, and topped out near $99,000.
Same title. Same posting, nearly. The candidates noticed within one phone call, because the first thing they asked was why the compliance seat’s ceiling sat $19,000 under the other seat’s floor.
The compliance-side search ran longer than its twin, and nobody in HR thought of it as an underpayment, because inside its own family the band was perfectly normal.
Most larger employers keep their pay bands by job family, and in our experience the family follows the reporting line rather than the title. Which is why I’d ask HR which family the seat sits in before opening a single salary site.
These are the three seats we price, with base bands for mid-to-senior hires in a typical U.S. metro and the federal line each one sits closest to.
| The seat | Base salary band | Closest federal line |
|---|---|---|
| Carries out a policy someone else wrote, which means keeping the catalog current, running the access-approval workflow, and escalating exceptions | $85,000 to $105,000 | Compliance officers, $80,730 median and $109,010 at the 75th percentile |
| Owns the policy, which means writing the standards, running the governance council, and settling definitions between departments | $120,000 to $155,000 | Database administrators ($104,620 median) up to database architects ($139,500 median) |
| Owns the policy and a dated regulatory deliverable, such as a state privacy-law mapping or the data file behind a high-risk AI system | About $138,000 to $178,000 (the second band plus 15 percent) | Database architects, $169,290 at the 75th percentile and $204,000 at the 90th |
Those are the same bands Mike Carter published in our hiring guide back in August, and I held them up against this month’s numbers before reusing them. Banks and hospital systems pay over the top of them. Not because their analysts are better. Examiners just read their work more closely. A Charlotte or Columbus seat tends to land ten to fifteen percent under the same job in the Bay Area or New York, at least in what crosses our desk. And if the deliverable is an AI program, that’s a neighboring desk, AI governance staffing.
A budget built for the first row and a posting written for the second won’t be fixed by negotiation. It gets fixed by regrading the seat, or by rewriting the posting. If the posting is what needs rewriting, our data governance job description template starts from the backlog the seat inherits.
Where the Money Sits
Industry first. Glassdoor’s industry medians for the title are $131,964 in financial services and $124,275 in information technology. Employer medians run wider. ServiceNow’s is $187,000, Citi’s $134,000, U.S. Bank’s $130,000, and Data Affect’s $105,000. All of it is total pay, all of it self-reported.
Experience doesn’t settle it either. Among the ten most recent Glassdoor submissions I could see, two people with 4 to 6 years of experience reported $75,000 to $87,000 in Houston and $147,000 to $173,000 in St. Louis. Three with 7 to 9 years reported $67,000 to $77,000 in Pawtucket, $121,000 to $140,000 in Dallas, and $126,000 to $147,000 in Richmond. Same experience bracket, and the figures run from $67,000 at the bottom to $147,000 at the top.
Geography is where the trackers start contradicting each other outright. Talent.com has California at $99,222, which is $7,766 under its own national figure of $106,988, with Virginia at $107,321 and Maryland at $105,484 ahead of it in the five states it lists. ZipRecruiter goes the opposite direction and puts Los Angeles at $122,771, or $8,832 above its national number. Fair enough, one’s a state and one’s a city. They still don’t agree on which way the sign points.
One last thing about ZipRecruiter. The Los Angeles premium is 7.752 percent on its analyst page and 7.751 percent on its data steward page. Two real local samples for two different jobs wouldn’t come out within a thousandth of a point of each other, so I’d read its city figures as a rate card until it says otherwise.
Do Certifications Move the Number?
Not that anybody can prove. Payscale lists $125,000 as the average base for the 76 people who report holding the CDMP from DAMA International, but the group is mostly data managers, who average $126,144, and data architects, who average $178,911. The data analysts in it average $76,862, which says more about seniority than about the credential.
Bonus and Total Pay
It’s mostly base pay. Payscale shows bonuses of $4,000 to $10,000, Glassdoor shows $20,000 to $38,000 in additional pay on top of $93,000 to $156,000 in base, and the two ranges don’t even overlap. Ask what the bonus actually paid out last year, not the target.
Data Governance Analyst Contract Rates
Some of this work comes with an end date, like the first build of a classification scheme and a catalog or the evidence file behind a regulatory deadline, and a contract usually fits that better than a permanent hire. The KORE1 Contract Rate Index has no governance row, so the table shows the two nearest neighbors at national median bill rates. A bill rate includes wages, payroll taxes, insurance, and our own costs. It isn’t take-home pay.
| Level | Data analyst or BI developer, median bill rate | Business systems analyst, median bill rate |
|---|---|---|
| Junior | $67 an hour ($61 to $80) | $65 an hour ($60 to $74) |
| Mid-level | $95 an hour ($82 to $111) | $84 an hour ($75 to $95) |
| Senior | $122 an hour ($107 to $132) | $106 an hour ($95 to $115) |
Source: KORE1 Contract Rate Index, 2026-Q4, effective October 16, 2026, modeled from BLS OEWS May 2025 wages plus a 24 percent employer burden. Ranges are the 25th to 75th percentile.
Six months of a mid-level contractor at the data analyst median comes to about $99,200 at 40 hours a week. The first build tends to run six to nine months, and after that somebody has to enforce what got built, which is why we most often see contract staffing for the build paired with direct hire for the run. The city-by-city version of this table lives on our data analyst and BI developer bill rates page.
Questions From the Offer Meeting
Is $100,000 enough for a data governance analyst?
It clears the first band and misses the second by $20,000. A seat that carries out a policy someone else wrote can hire at $100,000 in most metros. A seat that owns the policy and settles definitions between departments starts at $120,000, and posting it lower tends to draw people who are one rung down.
Why does Glassdoor say $147,339 when Payscale says $68,467?
Different samples, different pay bases, and a title that covers two jobs. Glassdoor’s figure is total pay from 337 submissions, while Payscale’s is base pay from 15 profiles, and neither says who is in its sample, so nobody outside them can fully explain the $78,872 gap.
Data steward or data governance analyst, which one pays more?
The analyst, on two of the three trackers, though the third disagrees loudly. Glassdoor has $147,339 against $108,833 for a steward, ZipRecruiter has $113,939 against $75,411, and Payscale flips it, $68,467 against $80,498, on an analyst sample of just 15. I’d lean on the others.
Where do entry-level data governance analysts actually start?
Around $85,000, going by postings. Glassdoor’s four most recent submissions from people with 1 to 3 years of experience reported $85,000 to $108,000, from New York, Maine, Los Angeles, and New Jersey. Payscale’s 10th percentile is $49,000, but that tracker only has 15 profiles for the title.
Does a CDMP add money?
Not provably. Payscale shows $125,000 for holders, but the group is mostly data managers and architects, so the average reflects seniority more than the credential. Treat it as a tiebreaker.
How long will the search take if the number is right?
Four to seven weeks from a scoped req to a signed offer in most U.S. markets, and KORE1 averages 17 days to hire across IT roles overall. Governance runs longer than that 17-day figure because the qualified pool is smaller. The variable that matters most, per our hiring guide, is how long your own team takes to agree on what the person is allowed to decide.
Grade the Seat Before You Pull a Number
If you take one thing from this page, take the question of which job family the seat is in and who signs the band. That answer is the difference between an $85,000 number and a $138,000 one, and it costs one call to HR to get.
Once you have the answer, our salary benchmark tool will sanity-check the band against a live market for free. If the seat turns out to be a data analyst job wearing a governance title, our data analyst salary guide has that number. And if you’d rather work the grading question through with people who fill these seats for a living, talk to our data staffing team. Even if the honest answer is to wait a quarter.
