Computer and Information Systems Manager Salary in Texas: Pay by Experience, City & Take-Home

A computer and information systems manager in Texas earns a median salary of $171,530 a year, or about $82.46 an hour, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2025). Most pay in the state lands between $106,390 at the 10th percentile and $277,160 at the 90th. Because Texas has no state income tax, that pay stretches further here than in most of the country.

How Texas pay compares to the national median

The national median for computer and information systems managers is $175,140, per BLS OEWS 2025. Texas sits just below that at $171,530, a gap of $3,610, or about 2.1 percent less than the U.S. figure. On the surface that reads like Texas pays slightly under the national rate.

That headline misses the part that actually hits your bank account. Texas levies no state income tax, while the states pushing the national median upward, California and New York chief among them, take a meaningful cut before you ever see the money. A $171,530 salary in Texas keeps more dollars than a similar gross in a high-tax state. We run the exact net comparison in the take-home section below, and the gap is larger than the $3,610 gross difference suggests.

Texas also employs a lot of these managers. The state counts 73,060 computer and information systems manager jobs, one of the deepest IT leadership markets in the country. Deep demand keeps the upper percentiles healthy: the 75th percentile here pays $213,550 and the 90th reaches $277,160, so the ceiling for senior technology leaders in Texas is well into the high-two-hundreds.

Salary by experience level in Texas

Pay for this role climbs steeply with scope and tenure. An early-career manager running a small team earns far less than a director-level leader owning an enterprise’s entire technology function. The table below maps the BLS percentile points to the experience stages they roughly track.

The spread is wide. The 90th percentile pays $170,770 more than the 10th, a sign that the title covers everything from a first-time IT supervisor to a VP of engineering or CIO. Crossing from the median into the 75th percentile is worth $42,020 a year in Texas, and that jump usually comes from owning bigger budgets, more headcount, or a P&L line rather than from raw years served. Managers who move from keeping the lights on to driving revenue-facing technology tend to land in that top quartile fastest.

Entry-level pay of $106,390 is still strong by any measure, and in a no-tax state it goes a long way. Early-career managers at the 25th percentile clear $136,870, which already lands them comfortably into six figures with room to grow. The biggest single lever between these stages is the size of the organization and the criticality of the systems you own.

It helps to read these percentiles as a career map rather than a yearly schedule. The hourly figures make the distance concrete: an entry manager bills out at roughly $51.15 an hour while a senior director equivalent sits at $133.25, more than double. The step from the 25th percentile to the median is worth $34,660 a year, and it usually arrives when a manager moves from supervising a single function to owning an end-to-end stack with budget authority. The state mean of $181,500 runs $9,970 above the $171,530 median, and that gap tells you the distribution is top-heavy: a cluster of very well-paid senior leaders pulls the average up past the middle of the pack. If you are benchmarking your own offer, the median is the more honest yardstick because the mean is skewed by those outliers.

One practical note for Texas specifically. Because the state takes no income tax, each of these gross steps converts to take-home more cleanly than it would in a state with a graduated state bracket. A $34,660 raise from the 25th to the 50th percentile is taxed only at the federal margin plus FICA, so a larger slice of every raise survives to your paycheck than it would across most state lines. That makes climbing the percentile ladder in Texas slightly more rewarding, dollar for dollar, than the same climb in California or New York.

Salary by metro area in Texas

Where you work inside Texas changes the number. The major metros cluster near the state median, but Austin leads and the smaller markets trail. Here are the five largest Texas metro areas by employment, with their median pay from BLS OEWS 2025.

Austin pays the most at $176,990, edging out the rest on the back of its dense technology employer base. It also sits above the national median, the only Texas metro on this list that does. Dallas-Fort Worth is the volume leader by a wide margin with 30,690 jobs, more than the next two metros combined, and its $173,810 median is a hair under Austin’s. If you want the most openings, Dallas-Fort Worth is the market.

Houston follows closely at $172,160 with 13,090 jobs, anchored by energy, healthcare, and aerospace employers that run large in-house IT organizations. San Antonio comes in lower at $163,490, and El Paso trails the group at $152,840 with a thin market of 770 positions. The gap between Austin and El Paso is $24,150, so metro choice alone can move your pay by roughly the cost of a new car each year. Cost of living moves in the same direction though: Austin’s higher housing costs eat into its pay edge, while El Paso’s lower median goes further on local rents.

The four big metros, Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, and San Antonio, together account for 58,920 of the state’s 73,060 jobs, or just over 80 percent of all information systems manager employment in Texas. That concentration is good news if you want options, because it means the bulk of openings, recruiters, and competing offers live in a handful of cities you can realistically target. It also means the three top metros pay within $4,830 of each other at the median, from Houston’s $172,160 to Austin’s $176,990, so a move between Austin, Dallas, and Houston is more about industry fit and housing cost than about chasing a higher salary band.

San Antonio is the interesting middle case. Its $163,490 median runs $13,500 below Austin, yet it carries a notably lower cost of living than either Austin or Dallas, which can make the lower gross competitive on a net-of-housing basis. El Paso, at $152,840, is the value play for anyone whose role can be based there: the gross is the lowest on the list, but it is still a six-figure salary in one of the most affordable major markets in the state, and Texas takes no income tax on top of that. The right metro depends less on the headline number than on what your housing costs do to the net.

Take-home pay after tax in Texas

Gross salary is the headline. Take-home is what you live on. Texas charges no state income tax, so the only deductions on these salaries are federal income tax and FICA (Social Security and Medicare). The table below shows estimated annual take-home at each experience stage for the 2026 tax year, using single-filer federal brackets.

At the median, a Texas information systems manager keeps $127,994 of a $171,530 salary, an effective tax rate of about 25.4 percent, and takes home $10,666 a month. The state-tax column reads $0 all the way down, which is the whole point of working in Texas.

Here’s the comparison an AI overview won’t run for you. Take that same $171,530 median and earn it in California instead. After California’s state income tax, the take-home on an identical gross drops to roughly $116,014, against $127,994 in Texas. That’s a gap of $11,980 a year that stays in your pocket simply because of where you file. Over a decade at the median, that difference alone is nearly $120,000, before you account for any raise. The gross salaries are close, but the net is not.

The gap widens as you climb. At the experienced 75th percentile, a $213,550 salary nets $158,814 in Texas with $0 in state tax, an effective rate of about 25.6 percent, and $13,235 a month to live on. A senior manager at the 90th percentile grosses $277,160 and keeps $200,225 after federal tax of $61,303 and FICA of $15,631, clearing $16,685 a month. The effective rate creeps up the ladder, from 21.8 percent at entry to 27.8 percent at the top, but every one of those state-tax cells stays at zero. The higher your salary, the more a no-tax state is worth in absolute dollars, because a high earner in California pays the top marginal state rate on a large base.

The number that actually matters is net pay minus local housing. A $127,994 take-home in Dallas or Houston, where housing costs less than the coastal metros, leaves far more discretionary money than the same net in San Francisco. When you compare offers across states, ignore the gross headline and run the net through your real rent or mortgage. A senior leader weighing a $277,160 Texas offer against a higher coastal gross should do the same math, because the $0 state-tax line plus cheaper housing can flip a smaller headline number into the better deal. To see your own figure, use the Texas paycheck calculator, and if you want help estimating brackets and deductions at filing time, TurboTax walks through it step by step.

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How to earn more as an information systems manager in Texas

The pay range here is wide enough that deliberate moves can add tens of thousands. The jump from the median to the 75th percentile is $42,020, and from the 75th to the 90th another $63,610. Here’s where that money comes from in this state specifically.

• Target Austin and Dallas-Fort Worth. Austin’s $176,990 median is the highest in the state, and Dallas-Fort Worth’s 30,690 jobs give you the most bargaining power to negotiate between competing offers. Concentrate your search where the market is deepest.
• Own a revenue-facing or mission-critical system. The 75th and 90th percentiles ($213,550 and $277,160) go to managers responsible for technology that the business cannot run without, not internal support functions. Move toward platform, product, or infrastructure ownership.
• Stack cloud and security credentials. Certifications like AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Azure Administrator, CISSP, and PMP carry weight with Texas employers in energy, finance, and healthcare. You can build these through providers like Coursera, which offers manager-level cloud and security tracks online.
• Manage bigger budgets and bigger teams. Compensation tracks scope. Moving from a five-person team to a forty-person organization with a real capital budget is the clearest path from the median into the top quartile.
• Use Texas’s no-tax status as negotiation context. When relocating from a high-tax state, frame your target around take-home parity. A lower Texas gross can still beat a higher coastal gross after tax, and knowing that gap helps you anchor offers realistically.
• Match your industry to the metro. Houston rewards energy and aerospace IT leadership, Dallas-Fort Worth is strong in finance, telecom, and logistics, and Austin concentrates software and semiconductor employers. Pairing your domain expertise with the metro that values it most is the fastest way to push from the $171,530 median toward the $213,550 experienced band.

To put the math in perspective: moving from the median to the 75th percentile adds $42,020 in gross, and because Texas takes no state tax, roughly three-quarters of that survives to your take-home. The same scope increase in a high-tax state would lose a chunk to the state bracket before it reached you. In practical terms, the levers above are worth more here per dollar of raise than almost anywhere else in the country, which is one reason experienced IT leaders relocate into Texas markets in the first place.

Job outlook for IT managers in Texas

The demand picture in Texas is strong. With 73,060 computer and information systems manager jobs statewide, Texas runs one of the largest IT leadership markets in the United States, and the role nationally is projected by BLS to grow much faster than average over the decade as organizations expand cloud, data, and cybersecurity operations. Dallas-Fort Worth alone holds 30,690 of those Texas jobs, with Houston and Austin adding another 24,140 between them.

That depth matters for your bargaining power. A large, active market means more openings, more competing employers, and more room to move for a raise rather than waiting for one. To see what’s hiring near you across these metros, a job board like ZipRecruiter aggregates current Texas IT management postings in one place.

Related and higher-paying roles in Texas

Information systems managers sit at the top of the IT pay ladder in Texas. The technical individual-contributor roles that feed into management earn less here, which is worth knowing if you’re weighing a move into or out of management. Compared with the $171,530 state median for this role:

• A software developer in Texas earns a median of $132,150, which is $39,380 less than an information systems manager in Texas.
• A computer systems analyst in Texas earns a median of $107,390, which is $64,140 less than an information systems manager in Texas.

In other words, stepping from a senior technical role into IS management is one of the larger single pay increases available in the field. The management premium over a systems analyst is more than $64,000 a year at the median in this state.

Frequently asked questions

Sources: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, OEWS May 2025 (occupation 11-3021); federal and FICA tax estimates for tax year 2026, single filer. Last updated 2026. See our methodology.