District data jobs pair ordinary database work with one extra layer. That layer is a set of federal rules on student records. The tooling is standard. Federal skill profiles list the same SQL and pipeline tasks that corporate analysts run. The difference is the records. Education data falls under FERPA, the federal student privacy law.
The pay numbers run to May 2025. The skill profiles describe occupations, not districts. No federal source counts how many districts staff these jobs full time. Read what follows as brackets around the field. It is not a map of any one org chart. Readers following this should also see Corporate training jobs for teachers, and what they pay.
Which district roles sit on the data?
Two clusters handle most of it. Student information staff keep grades, attendance, and enrollment moving through district systems. Warehousing roles build the pipes that pull those records into reports. The Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 75,000 database administrator jobs in 2025. Educational services employed 11 percent of them.
Operations data adds more. Transportation runs and finance rows also need stewards. State reporting deadlines keep the calendars full. The federal profiles do not name district titles. Expect local labels such as data analyst or systems administrator to cover this work. This connects to our earlier piece, School administrator pay: what public salary data shows.
What tooling do district data jobs expect?
SQL comes first. O*NET marks it a hot technology for data warehousing specialists, along with MySQL and Transact-SQL. Reporting tools such as SQL Server Reporting Services appear on the same list. Cloud platforms, including Amazon EC2 and Apache Hive, round out the profile.
The tasks center on movement and trust. O*NET lists specialists who build extraction and loading models. The work also means mapping data between source systems and warehouses. A third task is verifying the structure, accuracy, or quality of warehouse data. Accuracy checks matter double when the rows are children.
Security tasks carry weight too. The administrator profile lists planning protection against accidental or unauthorized damage. It also lists testing changes and setting user access. A misconfigured view is not just a bug when the table holds discipline records. District versions of these tasks come with audit season.
What does the pay data show?
The federal wage data puts the database administrator median at $104,620 as of May 2025. Educational services paid a median of $86,330. That sits well under the $124,130 posted by computer systems design firms. Database architects earned a $139,500 median across all industries.
The spread is wide. Administrators in the bottom 10 percent earned under $60,230, and the top 10 percent cleared $163,320. Growth is steady, not hot. The bureau projects 4 percent employment growth for administrators and architects from 2025 to 2035. That is about as fast as the average occupation. Roughly 7,300 openings a year will appear, most of them replacements.
How does FERPA change the work?
The Student Privacy Policy Office defines FERPA as the law that gives parents access to education records. It also gives them amendment rights and some control over disclosure of personally identifiable information. District data work happens inside those limits every day.
Access design is where the law meets the schema. Setting user access levels for each database segment counts among core administrator tasks in the federal profile. That task is routine in any shop. When the segments hold student records, those decisions carry legal weight. Marketing data never adds that layer.
Conclusion: the tools transfer, the rules do not
For a corporate analyst, the trade is a pay cut for purpose. Educational services medians run roughly $18,000 under the private tech figure. For a teacher, the reverse holds. The privacy layer is already familiar, and the edge is knowing what each row means in a school day.
The sources leave gaps. They cannot say how many districts fund full-time data staff. They also cannot rank the titles that dominate local postings. Scan live district listings near you. Match the tools above against the requirements. The overlap will tell you whether to apply now or skill up first.
