Data Scientist Salary in Ohio: Pay by Experience, City & Take-Home

A data scientist in Ohio earns a median of $102,630 a year, or about $49.34 an hour, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2025). Most of the field sits between $61,710 at the 10th percentile and $160,650 at the 90th, so where you land depends heavily on experience, metro, and employer. That median runs roughly $17,600 below the national figure, which matters when you weigh Ohio’s lower cost of living against coastal pay.

How Ohio compares to the national average

The national median for data scientists is $120,230, per BLS OEWS 2025. Ohio’s median of $102,630 trails that by $17,600, or about 15%. That gap is real, but it tracks the cost-of-living difference between Ohio and the high-paying coastal markets that pull the national number up. A six-figure salary stretches further in Columbus or Cincinnati than the same number does in San Francisco or New York.

The spread inside Ohio is wide. Entry-level pay at the 10th percentile is $61,710, the 25th percentile sits at $79,510, the 75th reaches $130,920, and the top 10% clears $160,650. So the best-paid data scientists in Ohio out-earn the national median comfortably. The state mean of $107,160 runs above the median, which tells you a cluster of high earners is pulling the average up. With about 6,100 data scientists employed statewide, this is a mid-sized but growing labor pool rather than a saturated one.

Data scientist salary in Ohio by experience

BLS reports pay by percentile, which maps closely to career stage in this field. Here’s how the numbers break down from your first role to senior and staff level.

The jump from entry to median is steep. Moving from the 10th to the 50th percentile is a $40,920 raise, and it usually comes fast once you’ve shipped production models and can show business impact. The climb from median to the 75th percentile adds another $28,290, and that step is where specialization pays off: people who move into ML engineering, who own a revenue-linked model, or who lead a small team tend to land here. The 90th percentile at $160,650 is mostly senior individual contributors and managers at large employers, often in finance, insurance, or healthcare analytics, which are big Ohio sectors.

Two things move you up this curve faster than tenure alone. First, demonstrable production work: a model that’s actually running and tied to a dollar figure beats three years of dashboards. Second, switching employers. In Ohio’s market, the fastest way from the median to the 75th percentile is often a jump to a company that competes for talent with remote-first coastal firms, because they benchmark against national pay.

It helps to read the percentile gaps as compounding milestones rather than a smooth slope. The first $17,800 of progress, from the 10th to the 25th percentile, is the toughest stretch in practice, because it’s where you’re proving you can work unsupervised and ship something that holds up in production. Once you clear $79,510, the climb to the median tends to accelerate: that $23,120 step from the 25th to the 50th percentile is usually one or two job moves, not five years of waiting. The reason is supply. Ohio has roughly 6,100 data scientists statewide, and the genuinely experienced, production-tested ones who can both build and deploy are scarcer than the title count suggests. Employers pay up to keep them.

One more thing the percentile table won’t show you directly: total compensation. BLS wage figures are base salary. At the 75th and 90th percentiles in Ohio, especially at larger insurers, banks, and tech-forward manufacturers, a meaningful slice of pay arrives as annual bonus, equity, or profit-sharing that doesn’t appear in OEWS. So if your offer’s base lands near the $130,920 experienced mark but includes a 10% to 20% bonus target, your real cash compensation is already brushing the 90th-percentile base of $160,650. Always compare offers on total cash, not base alone.

Data scientist salary in Ohio by city

Metro matters. The five largest Ohio metros for this role show a spread of more than $13,000 between the top and bottom. Columbus leads, which fits its concentration of insurance, banking, and corporate analytics headquarters.

Columbus pays the highest median at $107,950, about $5,300 above the state median and the clear top of the table. Cincinnati has the most data scientists of any Ohio metro at 1,680 jobs, with a median of $102,650 that sits right on the state line, helped by large consumer-goods and financial employers. Cleveland follows closely at $101,860 with 1,260 jobs, anchored by healthcare systems and manufacturing analytics. Akron and Dayton pay less, $99,780 and $94,620 respectively, and have thinner markets, though Dayton’s defense and aerospace research presence keeps demand steady. If you’re geographically flexible, Columbus offers the best combination of pay and job volume.

The metro gap looks small on paper, just $13,330 between Columbus and Dayton, but it compounds when you factor in housing. Columbus pays the most and, despite recent price growth, still has a lower cost base than the coastal markets data scientists often compare against. Cincinnati’s draw is volume: with 1,680 jobs it has the deepest pool of openings in the state, which matters if you want options without relocating every time you change roles. A thick local market also gives you bargaining power at raise time, because a credible outside offer is easy to come by.

Cleveland is the interesting case. Its median of $101,860 is a hair below the state figure, but its employer mix is heavily weighted toward large hospital systems and industrial firms, which means stable, long-tenure roles and strong demand for healthcare and operations analytics specifically. If your background is in clinical data or supply-chain modeling, Cleveland may pay you above its headline median. Akron and Dayton are smaller markets where individual employers carry more weight: in a 270-job or 310-job metro, a single large hire or a defense contract can move the needle on local pay in a way it never would in Cincinnati. The practical takeaway is that if you can work hybrid or remote for a Columbus or Cincinnati employer while living in a cheaper Ohio metro, you capture the higher salary and the lower cost of living at once.

Take-home pay after taxes in Ohio

Gross salary isn’t what hits your account. Here’s the after-tax picture across the same four career points, accounting for 2026 federal income tax, FICA (Social Security and Medicare), and Ohio state income tax for a single filer taking the standard deduction.

At the median, an Ohio data scientist keeps $78,461 of a $102,630 salary, an effective tax rate of 23.6% across all three layers. Ohio’s state bite is light: just $2,126 at the median, because the state has moved to a low flat-rate structure that tops out near 3% in 2026. That’s one of the friendlier state tax pictures in the country for a six-figure earner.

The cross-state comparison that matters: take the same $102,630 median and move it to Texas, a state with no income tax. In Texas, that salary nets about $80,586 a year. In Ohio it nets $78,461. So Texas leaves you with $2,125 more per year on identical gross pay, purely because Ohio levies a state income tax and Texas doesn’t. That’s the entire gap, about $177 a month. It’s a real difference, but it’s small enough that Ohio’s lower housing costs can easily erase it. A $2,125 tax penalty disappears fast when your mortgage or rent is several hundred dollars a month cheaper than in Austin or Dallas.

That’s the number to anchor on: net pay minus local housing is what actually determines your standard of living, not the headline salary. A data scientist netting $78,461 in Columbus, where median home prices and rents sit well below the big Texas metros, often has more genuine disposable income than someone netting $80,586 in a pricier Texas market. Before you accept an offer, run the exact figure through the Ohio paycheck calculator, then subtract your real housing cost. If you want the tax side handled cleanly at filing time, TurboTax walks through Ohio’s flat-rate return and any local municipal tax you may owe on top of state.

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Look at how the effective rate climbs as you move up the table. At entry level the all-in rate is 17.9%, so you keep $50,642 of $61,710. At the median it’s 23.6%, at the experienced point 25.8%, and at the senior level 27.5%. That progression is the federal brackets at work, not Ohio’s. The state portion stays remarkably flat in dollar terms relative to income: $981 at entry, $2,126 at the median, $3,116 experienced, and $4,156 at the senior level. Even the top earner in this table hands Ohio just over $4,100, which is what a low flat rate looks like in practice. The lesson for budgeting is that your federal withholding, not the state, is what changes most as you get promoted, so each raise nets you less than the gross suggests.

It’s also worth seeing the monthly figures clearly, because that’s the cadence most people budget on. Entry level nets $4,220 a month, the median $6,538, the experienced bracket $8,093, and senior earners $9,700. The roughly $2,300 monthly difference between the median and experienced points, $78,461 versus $97,121 a year, is what funding a faster mortgage payoff, a larger retirement contribution, or a college fund actually looks like in cash terms. That’s the real-world stake behind the climb from the 50th to the 75th percentile.

One Ohio-specific wrinkle worth budgeting for: many Ohio cities levy a municipal income tax of roughly 1.5% to 2.5% on top of the state rate, depending on where you live and work. The state figures above don’t include that local layer, so your true take-home in a city like Columbus or Cleveland may be a touch lower than the table shows. Some Ohio suburbs grant partial credit for tax paid to the city where you work, so two people with identical salaries can end up with different net pay based solely on which municipality they live in. The calculator lets you add your municipality so the number reflects your actual address.

How to earn more as a data scientist in Ohio

The data shows a $99,000 spread between the 10th and 90th percentiles, so there’s real room to move. Here’s how Ohio data scientists actually close that gap:

• Move into ML engineering or MLOps. The 75th-percentile salary of $130,920 is heavily populated by people who can deploy and maintain models in production, not just build them in a notebook. Owning the full pipeline is the clearest path from median to experienced pay.
• Target Columbus employers. The Columbus median of $107,950 runs $5,300 above the state figure and $13,330 above Dayton. If you can relocate or go hybrid into a Columbus role, that’s an immediate raise on identical work.
• Specialize in a high-paying Ohio sector. Insurance, banking, and healthcare analytics dominate the state’s top-paying roles. Domain expertise in actuarial modeling, fraud detection, or clinical data is what pushes you toward the $160,650 ceiling.
• Add credentials that signal production skill. Cloud certifications (AWS, Azure, GCP machine-learning specialties) and structured upskilling in deep learning or data engineering map directly to the senior bracket. You can stack relevant certificates through Coursera while working, which is how a lot of Ohio analysts make the jump into the data-scientist title and pay band.
• Switch employers strategically. Companies that benchmark against national remote pay will pay above the local median to land you. The fastest single move from the 50th to the 75th percentile in Ohio is usually a job change, not an internal raise.
• Lead a project or a small team. The 90th-percentile bracket at $160,650 is mostly senior ICs and managers. Taking ownership of a revenue-linked model or mentoring junior analysts is what gets you there.
• Negotiate on total compensation, not base. Because BLS reports base salary only, a strong Ohio offer at the median base of $102,630 can be worth far more once bonus and equity are added. When you negotiate, push on the bonus target and any sign-on, since those often have more room than base in a market that benchmarks against the state median.

Put numbers on the payoff and the case for upskilling gets concrete. Moving from the median of $102,630 to the experienced 75th percentile of $130,920 is a $28,290 raise, roughly a 28% bump. Going from the median to the 90th percentile of $160,650 is a $58,020 jump, more than half again your pay. A focused certificate or a deliberate move into ML engineering that takes six to twelve months to complete pays for itself many times over against gains of that size. The math strongly favors investing in the skill that moves you one percentile bracket up, because in this field a single bracket is worth tens of thousands a year, every year, for the rest of your career.

Job outlook for data scientists in Ohio

Ohio employs about 6,100 data scientists as of BLS OEWS 2025, spread across the state’s major metros. Data science is among the fastest-growing occupations nationally, and Ohio’s concentration of insurance, banking, healthcare, and advanced manufacturing keeps local demand healthy. The state mean of $107,160 sitting above the median is a sign employers are competing on pay for experienced talent rather than sitting on a glut of applicants.

Cincinnati and Columbus together account for more than half the state’s data-science jobs, so that’s where postings concentrate. If you’re job-hunting, set salary filters at or above the relevant metro median so you don’t anchor low, and watch for roles in actuarial science, risk, and clinical analytics where Ohio runs deep. You can scan current openings and pay ranges on ZipRecruiter to see what local employers are actually offering right now.

Related and higher-paying roles in Ohio

If you’re weighing data science against adjacent tech roles in Ohio, here’s how the pay compares using BLS state medians. A software developer in Ohio earns a median of $114,090, which is $11,460 MORE than a data scientist in Ohio. A computer systems analyst earns $102,320, which is $310 LESS than a data scientist in Ohio, so those two roles pay almost identically here. Software development is the clearer step up on pay alone, though data science tends to offer higher ceilings at the senior end.

Frequently asked questions

Sources: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, OEWS 2025 (occupational and metro wage data, SOC 15-2051); federal, FICA, and Ohio state tax estimates for 2026 tax year. Last updated 2026. See our methodology.