Network and Systems Administrator Salary in Texas: Pay by Experience, City & Take-Home

A network and systems administrator in Texas earns a median of $101,240 a year, or about $48.67 an hour, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2025). Most people in the role land between $79,570 and $128,140, with the bottom 10% near $63,650 and the top 10% above $155,430. Texas pays slightly above the national median, and because the state takes no income tax, more of that gross actually reaches your bank account.

How Texas pay compares to the national average

Texas pays network and systems administrators a median of $101,240, which runs $2,110 above the national median of $99,130 reported by the BLS for 2025. That’s a modest premium on paper, but the gap widens once taxes enter the picture. The state mean sits higher still, at $104,900, which tells you the upper half of the pay distribution is dense with well-paid senior roles rather than thin outliers.

About 34,840 people work in this occupation across Texas, one of the larger state workforces in the country for the role. That depth matters when you’re job hunting: more employers, more competing offers, and more room to move between metros without leaving the state. The 2.1% premium over the national figure is real, but the no-income-tax structure is the bigger story, and we break that down in the take-home section below.

It helps to read the national number in context. The BLS national median of $99,130 blends low-cost rural states with expensive coastal markets, so a flat comparison undersells what Texas offers. A California or New York administrator might post a higher gross, but state income tax claws a chunk of it back, while the Texas median of $101,240 lands in your account almost intact. When you stack after-tax dollars next to local rent, the Texas figure competes with markets that look richer on the headline. That’s the lens to keep through the rest of this page: the gross number is only the starting point, and the structure of the deduction matters as much as the size of the paycheck.

Network administrator salary in Texas by experience

Pay climbs steadily as you move from a first help-desk-adjacent role into senior infrastructure work. The table below maps the BLS percentile points to typical career stages. Entry pay tracks the 10th percentile, the median reflects a solid mid-career administrator, and the 90th percentile is where senior and lead administrators sit.

The spread is wide. A senior administrator in the 90th percentile earns roughly $91,780 more than someone starting at the 10th percentile, a difference that comes down to certifications, cloud and security depth, and the size of the systems you’re trusted to run. The jump from early career ($79,570) to mid career ($101,240) is where most of the early momentum happens, usually within the first five to eight years as you take on more of the network stack and on-call responsibility.

Look at the gaps between each step and you can see where the bargaining power sits. From the 10th to the 25th percentile is a $15,920 climb, the reward for getting past your first credential and proving you can run a small environment unsupervised. The 25th to the 50th adds $21,670, the largest single jump in the table, and it usually maps to the moment an administrator takes ownership of production systems rather than supporting them. From the median to the 75th percentile is another $26,900, and that step almost always requires specialization: cloud architecture, security, or virtualization at scale. The final stretch from the 75th to the 90th adds $27,290, the territory of lead and principal administrators who design the infrastructure rather than maintain it.

What this means in practice: don’t expect pay to rise smoothly with tenure alone. Administrators who plateau tend to be the ones who stop adding certifications after their first networking credential. The ones who reach the top quartile keep stacking skills that employers can’t easily hire for, and they take on the on-call, the migrations, and the outages that build the reputation behind a raise. Years of experience help, but in this role specific, verifiable capability moves your number more than time served.

Network administrator salary by Texas metro

Where you work inside Texas shifts pay by real money. The five largest metro workforces show a spread of more than $22,000 at the median between the top-paying and lowest-paying areas. Austin and Dallas-Fort Worth lead, reflecting their concentration of tech employers and data-center work.

Austin posts the highest median at $104,520, edging out Dallas-Fort Worth at $103,260. Dallas-Fort Worth carries by far the largest workforce, with 11,740 administrators, so it offers the most openings even if Austin’s median runs a touch higher. Houston sits close to the statewide median at $101,430. San Antonio comes in at $96,770, and El Paso trails the group at $82,370, a gap of $22,150 below Austin. That El Paso figure still beats the cost of living there, so the lower headline number doesn’t automatically mean a worse deal once rent is factored in.

A few practical reads on this table. Dallas-Fort Worth is the obvious center of gravity. With 11,740 administrators it holds about a third of every job in the state, and its $103,260 median sits just $1,260 below the top-paying Austin. If you want the widest set of employers, the most lateral moves, and pay within a hair of the best in Texas, Dallas-Fort Worth is the safe bet. Austin trades volume for a slightly higher ceiling, with 5,030 roles concentrated in tech and semiconductor employers that pull the median up to $104,520.

Houston deserves a closer look than its near-median $101,430 suggests. With 6,330 administrators it’s the second-largest market in the state, anchored by energy, healthcare, and the medical center, all of which run critical infrastructure that pays for reliability. San Antonio’s $96,770 reflects a strong military, cybersecurity, and government services base, and its lower median is partly offset by lower housing costs. El Paso, at $82,370 with just 560 administrators, is the smallest and lowest-paying of the five, but it’s also the cheapest place to live in the group. The honest takeaway: the right metro depends on what you weigh more, the headline salary or the dollars left after rent. The Austin-to-El Paso gap of $22,150 looks decisive until you price a two-bedroom in each city.

Take-home pay after tax in Texas

Texas levies no state income tax, so your deductions come down to federal income tax and FICA (Social Security and Medicare). That’s the structural advantage of working here. The table shows estimated annual and monthly take-home at each career stage for 2026, using single-filer federal brackets.

At the median salary of $101,240, a Texas administrator keeps $79,608 a year, about $6,634 a month, for an effective tax rate of 21.4%. The state-tax column reads $0 across every row, and that zero is the whole point of the comparison below. Notice how the effective rate climbs with income: 16.5% at the entry level, 21.4% at the median, 23.3% at the experienced level, and 24.7% at the senior level. That’s the federal progressive bracket structure at work, since FICA and the absent state tax don’t drive the increase. Even at the senior 90th-percentile salary of $155,430, the all-in effective rate stays under 25%, which is unusually low for that income because there’s no state layer on top.

Take the same $101,240 median to California and the math changes. A network administrator earning that salary nets about $74,166 there after state income tax, versus $79,608 in Texas. That’s an exact gap of $5,442 a year kept in Texas, purely from the absence of a state income tax. Over a decade, that difference compounds into more than $54,000 of after-tax income, before you even account for any pay differences between the two states.

The number that actually matters for your life is net pay minus local housing. A $79,608 net in Houston or San Antonio stretches a lot further than a higher gross in a coastal metro where rent eats half your paycheck. Here’s the simple way to use it. Take your net monthly figure from the table, say $6,634 at the median, and subtract your real all-in housing cost. If a comparable two-bedroom runs $1,800 a month in San Antonio, you’ve got roughly $4,834 left for everything else. Run the same exercise on an offer in a higher-tax, higher-rent metro and the Texas number frequently wins even when the gross is smaller. That’s the calculation that should decide a relocation, not the headline salary on the job posting.

Before you accept or compare offers, run your exact figure through the Texas paycheck calculator, then subtract your real monthly housing cost to see what’s left. If you’d rather model the federal side and deductions in detail at filing time, TurboTax walks through the federal brackets that drive these numbers, and it’s a quick way to sanity-check whether your withholding matches the effective rate in the table.

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How to earn more as a network administrator in Texas

The distance between the median ($101,240) and the 90th percentile ($155,430) is where your effort pays off. Concrete moves that push administrators up the curve in this state:

• Go cloud-first. Texas employers in Dallas-Fort Worth and Austin run heavy AWS and Azure footprints. An AWS Solutions Architect or Azure Administrator certification is one of the clearest paths from the median toward the 75th percentile ($128,140).
• Add security depth. Security+ then a CISSP track turns a general administrator into a network-security specialist, the profile that fills the senior 90th-percentile roles ($155,430).
• Get the networking credentials. CCNA into CCNP remains the standard ladder for administrators who want to own the network stack, and Texas’s data-center growth keeps demand high.
• Move to a higher-paying metro. Shifting from El Paso ($82,370) to Austin ($104,520) is a $22,150 median bump for the same job title, and remote-friendly Texas employers let you capture metro pay without relocating in some cases.
• Target the right employers. Large enterprises, healthcare systems, and energy firms in Houston and Dallas pay above the median for administrators who manage critical, around-the-clock infrastructure.

One more lever worth naming: automation. Administrators who can script with Python or PowerShell and manage infrastructure as code with tools like Terraform and Ansible are the ones employers fight to keep, because they cut the headcount needed to run a growing environment. That skill set is also the bridge into the higher-paying roles in the next section. If you’re aiming for the experienced or senior tier, treat scripting as a core competency, not a nice-to-have.

If you’re building toward any of these, structured certification prep through Coursera covers the AWS, Azure, security, and automation tracks that move the needle most for Texas administrators. The fastest return usually comes from pairing one cloud certification with one security credential, since that combination is exactly what fills the 75th- and 90th-percentile roles in this state.

Job outlook for network administrators in Texas

Texas employs 34,840 network and systems administrators, making it one of the deepest markets in the country for the role. That scale is driven by the state’s data-center buildout, corporate relocations into Dallas-Fort Worth and Austin, and a large energy and healthcare base that all need always-on infrastructure. With nearly 17,000 of those jobs concentrated in Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston alone, the openings cluster where the major employers sit. To see what’s live right now across these metros, ZipRecruiter lists current Texas administrator roles by city and pay range.

Related and higher-paying roles in Texas

If you want to grow your pay without leaving IT, two adjacent roles in Texas pay more than network administration. A software developer in Texas earns a median of $132,150, which is $30,910 more than a network administrator in Texas. A computer systems analyst earns a median of $107,390, or $6,150 more than this role. Both are realistic moves for an administrator who already knows the systems and can pick up scripting, automation, or analysis work.

The computer systems analyst path is the shorter jump. At $6,150 above the network administrator median, it rewards the business-facing skills many administrators already touch, mapping requirements to systems, planning migrations, and bridging IT with operations. The software developer path pays far more, $30,910 above this role, but it asks for a real shift into coding as the core of the job rather than a tool on the side. If you’ve already leaned into automation and infrastructure as code, that transition is closer than it looks, and the $30,910 gap is a strong reason to push the scripting skills hard. Either move keeps you in the same Texas tax environment, so every dollar of the raise carries the same no-state-tax advantage described above.

Frequently asked questions

Sources: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics OEWS, 2025; federal and FICA tax estimates for tax year 2026. Last updated 2026. See our methodology.