Compare · Updated 16 September 2026
Cybersecurity Analyst vs Data Analyst: which pays more and which is faster?
Same sourced data as the career pages, side by side.
Cybersecurity Analyst pays more at mid-career: a median of $124,000 against $88,000 for Data Analyst, about 41% higher. Data Analyst is faster to enter: the quickest verified route takes about 6 months versus 9 for Cybersecurity Analyst. Job growth favours Cybersecurity Analyst (21% projected over ten years, BLS 2025-35, versus 12%).
| Cybersecurity Analyst | Data Analyst | |
|---|---|---|
| Entry median | $90,000 | $68,000 |
| Mid-career median | $124,000 | $88,000 |
| Senior median | $180,000 | $115,000 |
| Top end | $227,000 | $154,571 |
| Roadmap hours | 1,230 | 630 |
| Fastest way in | Managed security service provider (MSSP) (9 mo) | Analytics bootcamp (6 mo) |
| Cheapest way in | $400 | $0 |
| Time to first job | 12–30 months | 9–18 months |
| Degree | The US Bureau of Labor Statistics lists a bachelor's degree as the typical entry-level education for information security analysts and many postings ask for one, but this field has a stronger tradition than most of hiring on demonstrated skill, and CompTIA Security+ plus a public detection lab plus two years of IT experience substitutes effectively outside federal roles and large regulated employers. | No degree is legally required to work as a Data Analyst and a portfolio genuinely substitutes for one at small and mid-size employers, but most large-company postings still list a bachelor's degree as a preference. |
| 10-year growth | 21% | 12% |
| Openings per year | 14,100 | 7,500 |
| Automation exposure | low | medium |
| Key certification | CompTIA Security+ (SY0-701, V7) | Google Data Analytics Professional Certificate |
| Tools | Splunk or Microsoft Sentinel, CrowdStrike, Defender for Endpoint or SentinelOne, Wireshark, Nmap, Burp Suite | SQL (PostgreSQL, Snowflake, BigQuery, SQL Server), Excel / Google Sheets, Power BI, Tableau, Looker / Looker Studio |
Salary figures checked September 2026 (Cybersecurity Analyst) and September 2026 (Data Analyst). Sources are listed on each career page.
What a Cybersecurity Analyst does
A Cybersecurity Analyst is the person who watches for and responds to things that should not be happening on a company's systems: triaging security alerts, investigating the real ones, containing incidents, and tuning the detections so the noisy alerts stop arriving.
A cybersecurity analyst is the person watching for, and responding to, things that should not be happening: a login from two countries twenty minutes apart, a server reaching out to an address nobody recognises, a phishing campaign against the finance team. In a security operations centre (SOC) the work is triage - alerts arrive, you decide within minutes whether each one is noise or an incident, you escalate the real ones and you tune the detection so the noisy ones stop arriving. In a smaller company the same person also does vulnerability management, access reviews, phishing training and the annual compliance audit.
- 21% projected growth from 2025 to 2035, the fastest of any large computing occupation (BLS)
- Certifications carry real screening weight, which helps candidates without a degree
- Demand in every sector: healthcare, finance, government, retail, manufacturing, not only tech companies
What a Data Analyst does
A Data Analyst is a person who turns a company's raw database into answers a manager can act on, using SQL, spreadsheets and a dashboard tool such as Power BI or Tableau.
A data analyst turns a messy company database into answers. The core loop is: a stakeholder asks something vague ("why did signups drop in July?"), you translate it into a query, pull the data with SQL, clean and check it, build a chart or a Power BI/Tableau dashboard, and write two paragraphs that say what happened and what to do. Most of the job is SQL and communication; the modelling is usually descriptive statistics, cohorts, funnels and the occasional A/B test readout. Titles vary a lot: business analyst, BI analyst, marketing analyst, product analyst, revenue operations analyst and healthcare data analyst are all the same skill set pointed at a different domain.
- Lowest barrier to entry of any six-figure-track data role: no degree requirement, no calculus, and a portfolio genuinely substitutes for credentials.
- Skills transfer across every industry, so you can follow the domain you find interesting or the one that pays.
- Mostly predictable hours - 40-45 a week outside month-end close and board-deck season.
How to choose between Cybersecurity Analyst and Data Analyst
- Pick Cybersecurity Analyst if the route that produces most first hires is not the one people plan: a help desk, desktop support, systems administration or managed security service provider job at $45,000 to $65,000 first, owning phishing triage and access reviews from inside, and transferring to the security team in 18 to 30 months, because a tier-1 security operations centre posting can draw hundreds of applicants who all hold the same certificate you do.
- Pick Data Analyst if internal transfer from a non-analyst job at your current employer produces more career-changer hires than cold applications do, because it converts domain knowledge you already have into the thing employers are actually short of; the certificate-plus-portfolio route works too, but it is the slowest of the five, at about 14 months and 150 to 300 applications.
The next moves that actually raise pay are cloud security, detection engineering, incident response and forensics, and eventually security architecture or management. Cloud security pays the most and borrows heavily from Cloud and DevOps engineering; architecture and management need CISSP and five years of experience. The jump from roughly $100,000 to the $180,000 Levels.fyi senior analyst median comes from picking one of those lanes and having a track record in it, not from another broad certificate. The natural next moves are analytics engineer, which pays more for deeper SQL, dbt and pipeline ownership, and Data Scientist, where the US Bureau of Labor Statistics median is $120,230 against $88,940 for the operations research analyst code that BLS uses for analyst work, and where a quantitative master's degree is a common filter.
Cybersecurity Analyst vs Data Analyst FAQ
Which pays more, Cybersecurity Analyst or Data Analyst?
At mid-career the median is $124,000 for a Cybersecurity Analyst and $88,000 for a Data Analyst; at senior level $180,000 versus $115,000. Entry medians are $90,000 and $68,000. Figures are US base plus typical bonus where reported, checked September 2026.
Is it faster to become a Cybersecurity Analyst or a Data Analyst?
The quickest verified route into Cybersecurity Analyst is Managed security service provider (MSSP) at about 9 months; for Data Analyst it is Analytics bootcamp at about 6 months. Our full roadmaps run 1,230 and 630 study hours respectively.
Which is harder to automate, Cybersecurity Analyst or Data Analyst?
We rate automation exposure low for Cybersecurity Analyst and medium for Data Analyst. Tooling now handles alert enrichment and first-pass triage, which is exactly the tier-1 work a career changer used to be hired to do, so the automation is compressing the entry layer rather than the occupation. What does not automate is taking responsibility during a live incident: deciding to isolate a production host, judging what an attacker did with the access they had, and explaining to a board why customer data was exposed. Large language models now write competent SQL and first-draft charts, which compresses the ticket-taking half of Data Analyst work and is one reason Indeed's Hiring Lab counted entry-level postings down 7.5 percent year over year in May 2026. Owning metric definitions, experiments and the stakeholder relationship is what does not automate.
Do I need a certification for Cybersecurity Analyst or Data Analyst?
No certification is legally required, but CompTIA Security+ is close to mandatory in practice: it is the most-screened entry credential and an approved Department of Defense 8140 IAT Level II baseline, so its absence filters you out of a large share of federal and defence-contractor postings. The voucher is $439 direct from CompTIA, raised from $425 on 1 June 2026, or about $373 to $395 through authorised resellers, on 80 to 150 hours of study. The Google Cybersecurity Professional Certificate at roughly $147 to $294 over three to six months is a curriculum rather than a credential - useful because it maps to the Security+ objectives and comes with a discounted voucher, but no employer screens on it. Leave CISSP ($749 plus a $135 annual maintenance fee) until you have the five years of experience it requires. No certification is required to work as a Data Analyst. The one with genuine screening value is Microsoft's PL-300 (Power BI Data Analyst Associate) at $165 for the exam in the United States and 40 to 90 hours of study, and it is worth having if you are targeting Microsoft-shop employers in corporate, healthcare, insurance or government. The Google Data Analytics Professional Certificate costs about $147 to $294 over three to six months and is worth taking as a curriculum, but it carries little weight as a credential on its own: there is no proctored exam and 3.8 million people have enrolled.