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. Good for a wall or a guidance counsellor.
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What you earn and what it costs to get there.
Median
$99,130
First job
$62,640
Top tenth
$155,050
The national median is $99,130 a year, and the bottom tenth start near $62,640. 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.
$45,000 to $60,000
Help desk or junior support, the usual first rung
Very few people walk straight into an administrator job. One to two years on a help desk, plus a certification, is the normal route to the $62,640 entry level in the survey.
$155,050 and above
Senior administrators and infrastructure engineers
The pay jump comes from specializing: Linux at scale, cloud infrastructure, or security. Administrators who can automate their own work with code earn the most.
Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel
This is one of the few well paid 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 $11,000 to $14,000 a year. A two year community college associate degree at about $4,000 a year, roughly $8,000 in total, sits in between and is very common.
This is one of the few well paid 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 are paid more 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.
Federal projections expect employment in this occupation to fall about 4 percent over the decade 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: roughly 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.
The oldest rule in this job. Plenty of organizations have discovered during a real failure that their backups were running but unusable. Good administrators test a restore on purpose, before they need one.
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.
About 323,600 people hold these jobs nationally, and federal projections expect a 4 percent decline to 2035 as software developers and automation absorb some of the work. Around 13,400 openings a year are still expected.
A large part of systems administration is deciding who gets access to what. Every permission you grant is a risk somebody else will have to live with, which is why the good ones are careful and unpopular in equal measure.
Last checked September 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.