Keep the servers, accounts and backups running so everyone else can do their job. Certifications count as much as a degree.
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Pay, the path, pros and cons and the facts on one printable page. Counsellors: send it to a student from your own email in one click.
Programs in the fields this career usually comes through. Each has its own page: what it takes to get in, the courses you need and what it costs.
The median pay is about $99,130 a year. Across everyone in the job it runs from about $62,640 at the lower end to about $155,050 at the upper end. The source is listed under Sources at the end of this page.
1 to 4 years after high school, on the usual route.
$900 to $49,000 all in for tuition, fees, exams and kit. Living costs are not counted.
No. There is no license to hold, though many employers still ask for training or a certificate.
Limited demand nationally, from government outlook data. Demand varies by region, so check your area.
Or read the whole thing here
What you earn and what it costs to get there.
Median
$99,130
Bottom tenth
$62,640
Top tenth
$155,050
The national median is $99,130 a year. The bottom tenth earn $62,640 or less and the top tenth $155,050 or more (2025 federal wage survey). The federal wage survey counts network and computer systems administrators as one occupation, about 323,600 jobs, so network engineers are in the same figures.
$61,860
Median for computer user support specialists, the help desk jobs that are the usual first rung, 2025
Very few people walk straight into an administrator job. One to two years on a help desk, plus a certification, is the normal route in.
$118,290 a year
The median in Maryland, the highest of any state
New Jersey is close behind at $116,420 and Massachusetts at $110,980. The lowest is West Virginia, at $74,490. State medians from the 2025 federal wage survey.
Roughly, all in
$900 to $49,000
Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel
This is one of the few technology fields where employers genuinely hire on certifications and demonstrated skill, so the low end is two or three vendor exams at a few hundred dollars each plus a home lab built from an old desktop or a cheap cloud account. The cheap door is real but still hard to walk through: you need a help desk job first, and someone willing to let you break things. The high end is four years of a bachelor's degree at an in-state public university at about $12,000 a year. A two year community college associate degree at about $4,150 a year, roughly $8,300 in total, sits in between and is very common.
This is one of the few technology fields where employers genuinely hire on certifications and demonstrated skill, so the cheap route is a real route.
Remote and hybrid work
Common, though somebody has to be able to reach the building when hardware fails.
Employer paid certifications
Most companies will pay for your exams because they need the skills.
Stable sectors
Hospitals, universities and government departments all run their own systems and hire steadily.
On-call pay
Being the person who answers at 3am usually comes with extra money or time off.
The exact path from high school to qualified.
Certifications and proof you can fix things matter more here than in almost any other technical field.
High school
Grades 11 and 12
Computer science if offered, plus math. Build a home server, break it, fix it. That experience is what you will talk about in interviews.
Associate degree or a bachelor's degree
2 to 4 years
Employers typically want a bachelor's in computer science or a related field, but many accept a two year degree or a certificate plus experience.
First job on a help desk
1 to 2 years
Password resets, broken laptops, printers. Unglamorous, and the fastest way to learn how an organization really works.
Get certified
Alongside work
A networking and a security certification first, then a platform one for the systems your employer actually runs.
Systems administrator
From year 2 or 3
You now own servers, accounts, backups and security permissions for real people.
Computer science
Any programming at all. Scripting is what separates a good administrator from a button-clicker.
Math
Logic, binary and subnetting arithmetic.
English
Half the job is writing documentation and explaining a failure to people who are angry about it.
Electronics or shop
Hardware still breaks, and someone has to open the case.
Nobody licenses systems administrators. What employers ask for instead are vendor and industry certifications in the products they actually run. CompTIA covers the general ground with Network+, Security+, Linux+ and Server+. Red Hat runs a hands-on practical exam for its Certified System Administrator credential, where you fix real broken systems rather than answer questions. Microsoft, Cisco and the big cloud providers each run their own. Employers often pay for them, so do not buy your own until you have asked.
Things you don't need, but that help.
Linux at scale
Most servers on the internet run Linux, and administrators who know it deeply can work on far more of them than those who only know Windows.
Cloud platforms
AWS (Amazon Web Services), Azure and Google Cloud. The work is moving there and the pay follows.
Automation and scripting
Python, PowerShell and configuration tools. Doing a hundred servers at once instead of one at a time.
Security
Hardening systems, patching and incident response. The clearest route out of the declining part of this field.
A home lab
An old machine or a cheap virtual server. Being able to say what you built and broke beats any course.
Patience with people
The user who deleted the file is your customer, not your enemy.
Clear documentation habits
The administrator whose notes let someone else fix it gets promoted.
Willingness to be on call
It is the part nobody wants, and it is how juniors get trusted.
O*NET (Occupational Information Network), the federal career database, rates this occupation as declining from 2025 to 2035, as cloud services and automation take over work that used to need a person. That does not make it a bad first job: about 13,400 openings a year are still expected from turnover. But treat it as a base to move from, into cloud infrastructure, security or engineering, rather than a job to hold unchanged for thirty years.
Day to day, pros and cons, where you'd work.
Check overnight alerts and whether the backups actually completed. Create accounts for new staff and shut off the ones who left. Patch a batch of servers, and deal with the one that does not come back up. Answer three interruptions about a shared drive nobody can reach. Spend the good part of the afternoon automating something you have done by hand four times. Then decide whether the odd log entry you noticed is nothing, or the start of a bad week.
The good
The hard parts
Things people don't tell you.
When O*NET (Occupational Information Network) surveyed people in this job, 30% said a new hire needs an associate degree, 27% a bachelor's degree and 20% a post-secondary certificate.
Red Hat's system administrator certification is a hands-on practical test. You are given broken systems and graded on whether they work at the end, which is why employers take it seriously.
Every list is built from the same numbers shown above, so you can see where this career sits next to the others.
Security and networks first, then the rest of the field. See every career in tech.
Last checked October 2026. Pay figures are typical full-time annual amounts in United States dollars, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics wage data and published pay scales. They vary by state, employer and experience. Tuition is for in-state students at public schools unless the card says otherwise. How every figure on this site is sourced and checked.
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