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

A data scientist in Illinois earns a median of $106,560 a year, or about $51.23 an hour, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2025). Most of the field falls between $68,810 at the 10th percentile and $168,880 at the 90th. That median sits a notch below the national figure, and Illinois taxes income at a flat rate, which shapes your real paycheck more than the headline number does.

How Illinois compares to the national median

The national median for data scientists is $120,230, per the BLS (2025). Illinois pays a median of $106,560, so the typical data scientist here earns about $13,670 less than the U.S. median, a gap of roughly 11 percent. That sounds like a knock against the state, but the picture is more nuanced once you look at where the work sits and what your money buys.

Two things drive the gap. First, the highest-paying data science markets are concentrated in the Bay Area, Seattle, and New York, which pull the national number up. Second, the Illinois mean of $117,870 runs well above the state median, a sign that a smaller group of senior and specialized roles, many of them in Chicago finance and insurance, stretches the top of the range. When the mean outruns the median like that, it tells you the ceiling is high even if the middle is modest. A strong mid-career data scientist in Illinois can clear $137,290 at the 75th percentile, which is competitive with the national median outright.

It helps to frame the comparison in dollars at each rung rather than just the midpoint. The Illinois 90th percentile of $168,880 is the kind of number that competes head to head with senior data science pay in much pricier coastal markets, and it comes without California’s top tax bracket or New York City’s local income tax layered on. The Illinois 10th percentile of $68,810 is the figure to anchor your floor expectations: even an early hire with a thin portfolio is unlikely to be offered much below that in a metro market. So the spread from $68,810 to $168,880 is the real Illinois range, and where you land inside it depends far more on your scope and industry than on the state line you happen to sit on.

Data scientist salary in Illinois by experience

Pay climbs steeply with experience in this field. The jump from entry level to senior is more than double, which is steeper than most office occupations. The table below maps BLS (2025) percentiles to career stages.

The big inflection comes between the 50th and 75th percentile, where pay jumps $30,730. That is the stretch where data scientists move from running models others scope to owning the problem end to end: defining the metric, shipping the pipeline, and defending the result to the business. Title changes to senior or staff data scientist usually track that move. The leap from early career to median is worth $21,950, which is why the first three to five years matter so much for lifetime earnings.

Read the percentiles as a career map rather than a snapshot. The $68,810 entry figure is roughly what a new graduate or a career switcher with a strong project portfolio commands in their first year or two. By the time you reach the 25th percentile at $84,610, you’ve usually shipped a few production models and can scope a problem without much hand-holding. The $106,560 median is the going rate for a solid generalist with three to six years of work who can be trusted with a full project. The $137,290 experienced mark and the $168,880 senior mark are where specialization, leadership, or a high-value domain like trading or insurance pricing start to pay off. The practical takeaway: each rung is worth roughly $20,000 to $31,000, so a single well-timed move into senior scope is often worth more than two or three annual raises in place.

Data scientist salary by Illinois metro

Where you sit in Illinois matters, and the surprise is that Chicago isn’t the top payer by median. Two downstate metros anchored by large employers pay more. The table covers the five Illinois metro areas with reported data scientist employment, per the BLS (2025).

Bloomington tops the list at $120,760, and Peoria is right behind at $120,000. Both punch above Chicago because their data science jobs cluster inside a few large corporate employers, insurance in Bloomington and heavy industry in Peoria, that need quantitative talent and have to pay national rates to get it in a smaller labor pool. The catch is volume. Those two metros report fewer than 1,000 data scientist jobs combined, against 7,940 in greater Chicago.

Chicago’s median of $107,640 sits just $1,080 above the statewide figure, and it holds roughly three-quarters of all the data scientist jobs in Illinois. If you want choice of employer, industry, and the option to switch jobs without moving, Chicago is the practical center of gravity. The 7,940 jobs there mean a deep market for both employers and candidates, so offers tend to track the broader national range, with the city’s finance, insurance, and healthcare systems anchoring the top end. Champaign-Urbana at $91,760 reflects its university-anchored market, where a meaningful share of roles are research and academic-adjacent rather than corporate, which tends to pull medians down even when the work is sophisticated. Rockford rounds out the bottom at $92,990.

The metro spread is wider than people expect: $28,000 separates Bloomington’s $120,760 from Champaign-Urbana’s $91,760. That’s a meaningful chunk of pay riding on geography alone. The trade-off to weigh is liquidity. The two top-paying metros are thin markets where a few employers dominate, so if your company restructures, your next local option may be limited. Chicago’s median is lower but the job count gives you mobility, and mobility is itself worth money over a career because it lets you bid offers against each other. For most data scientists in Illinois, the honest math is that Chicago’s combination of volume, industry breadth, and a median right at the state line is the safest base, while Bloomington and Peoria are worth a hard look if a specific high-paying employer is hiring and you’re comfortable in a smaller market.

Take-home pay after taxes in Illinois

The headline salary is not what lands in your account. Illinois charges a flat 4.95 percent income tax on every dollar, so unlike states with brackets, your state rate doesn’t climb as you earn more. Federal tax and FICA still scale up, though. The table below shows estimated take-home for a single filer at each career stage, using 2026 tax figures from the DATA on this page.

At the median, a data scientist keeps $78,076 of a $106,560 salary, about $6,506 a month, for an effective rate near 26.7 percent. The senior figure of $117,823 net works out to $9,819 a month, with an effective rate of about 30.2 percent once federal tax climbs. Notice how the total bite grows as you move up the table: an entry data scientist loses about 22.4 percent of gross to taxes, while a senior loses 30.2 percent. That’s federal brackets and the FICA wage base doing the work, since Illinois’s state share stays flat at 4.95 percent the whole way. In plain terms, the $5,275 of Illinois tax at the median grows to $8,360 at the senior level, but only because the salary it’s applied to grew, not because the rate did.

One detail worth knowing for budgeting: the gap between gross and net widens fastest in federal tax. An entry-level data scientist owes about $6,752 in federal tax, while a senior owes $29,778, more than four times as much on a salary that’s about 2.5 times larger. FICA, the Social Security and Medicare slice, runs $5,264 at entry and $12,919 at the top. If you’re modeling a raise or a job switch, the rule of thumb in Illinois is that you keep roughly 70 cents of each additional dollar near the median and closer to 68 cents once you’re well into the experienced range.

Here’s the cross-state comparison that the salary sites skip. Take the exact same $106,560 median and move it to Texas, which has no state income tax. The Texas net comes to $83,351, against $78,076 in Illinois. That’s a gap of $5,275 a year, the full cost of Illinois’s flat 4.95 percent tax on this salary, money a Texas data scientist keeps and an Illinois one doesn’t. Over a decade that’s roughly $53,000 in pre-investment dollars. It doesn’t mean Texas wins outright, because pay levels and housing differ, but it’s the real number to weigh, not the gross.

The figure that actually matters is net pay minus local housing. A Chicago data scientist clearing $6,506 a month nets more usable income than the gross gap with Texas suggests, because much of Illinois sits well below coastal housing costs. Run your own numbers through the Illinois paycheck calculator, then subtract your rent or mortgage to see what’s really left. When you file, software like TurboTax can flag the Illinois credits and deductions that nudge your effective rate down.

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How to earn more as a data scientist in Illinois

The data points to clear levers. The $30,730 jump between the median and the 75th percentile is the prize, and it’s reachable inside a few years if you target the right skills and the right employers.

• Aim for the Chicago finance and insurance stack. The state mean of $117,870 runs $11,310 above the median, and a lot of that spread sits in Chicago’s banks, trading firms, and insurers, who pay premiums for production machine learning and risk modeling.
• Move into senior or staff scope. Owning a metric and a pipeline end to end, not just building models on request, is what separates the 50th percentile from the 90th. Push for ambiguous, business-defining problems.
• Specialize where pay is highest. Machine learning engineering, MLOps, and causal inference command the top of the range. Cloud certifications in AWS or GCP and a strong production track record both move offers. Structured courses on Coursera can fill specific gaps like deep learning or data engineering without a full degree program.
• Consider the high-median downstate metros. If you can relocate, Bloomington at $120,760 and Peoria at $120,000 both pay above Chicago’s median, often with lower housing costs.
• Negotiate against the mean, not the median. When the mean outruns the median by this much, it means top offers exist. Cite the $137,290 experienced and $168,880 senior benchmarks when you have the track record to back them.
• Or pivot to software development. The single biggest pay jump available without leaving the state is a move into software development, which pays a median of $132,110 in Illinois, $25,550 above the data scientist median. If you already write production code, that gap is worth a serious look.

Put numbers on the upside. Moving from the median to the experienced rung is worth $30,730 in gross, or roughly $19,700 in take-home after Illinois taxes. Reaching the senior 90th percentile from the median adds $62,320 gross, about $39,700 net. Those aren’t abstract goals: the BLS data says one in four data scientists in Illinois already earns above $137,290, and one in ten clears $168,880. The path there is concrete, build a production track record, specialize into a high-value domain, and time your moves into roles with broader scope rather than waiting on in-place raises.

Job outlook for data scientists in Illinois

Illinois employs about 10,520 data scientists, per the BLS (2025), and roughly 7,940 of them, three in four, work in the Chicago metro. That concentration cuts both ways: deep demand and employer choice in Chicago, but a thinner market downstate where a handful of large companies set the pay. Nationally, data science remains one of the faster-growing occupations the BLS tracks, driven by demand for machine learning, analytics, and AI talent across finance, healthcare, and logistics, all industries with heavy Illinois footprints. To see what’s open right now and what employers are actually paying, a job board like ZipRecruiter is a quick way to scan live listings across Chicago and the downstate metros.

Related and higher-paying roles in Illinois

If your skills carry over, two adjacent tech roles in Illinois bracket data science on pay, per the BLS (2025). A Software Developer in Illinois earns a median of $132,110, which is $25,550 more than a data scientist in Illinois, a real raise if you lean toward engineering and shipping software over modeling. A Computer Systems Analyst earns a median of $101,570, which is $4,990 less than a data scientist in Illinois, so moving that direction usually means a modest pay step down in exchange for a different mix of work.

Frequently asked questions

Sources: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) 2025; ThePayGuide 2026 tax estimates for Illinois. Last updated 2026. See our methodology.