The annual Data Science Salary report for 2022 is presented by AIM and Hero Vired. This research is the only annual study in India that delves extensively into India’s data science salary trends and provides a comprehensive view of the changing landscape. This report, now in its eighth year, covers the median salary distribution across multiple categories, including cities, education, sector, years of experience, and key data science roles.

The rate at which businesses across various industries are shifting from traditional to digital business models generates a massive amount of data that needs to be handled effectively for businesses to thrive in today’s hyper-competitive market. In fact, this influx of data has also created multiple job roles across multiple domains by years of experience. And, it has been a challenge for business leaders and companies to determine the right salary by the roles and years of experience in this continuously evolving field.

This report presents a holistic view of salary trends across different parameters in the data science industry. It has considered the database of around 40,000 data science professionals from the different roles, domains and industries.

This report can be studied by entrepreneurs, industry policymakers, companies, data science experts to get the overall view about the salary structures across multiple roles, sectors, cities, experience levels, and others.

Read reports from previous years.

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There median salary of data science professionals in India increased to INR 16.8 lakhs per annum, up by 25.4% compared to last year.

The rate at which businesses across various industries are shifting from traditional to digital business models generates a massive amount of data that needs to be handled effectively for businesses to thrive in today’s hyper-competitive market. In fact, this influx of data has also created multiple job roles across multiple domains by years of experience. And, it has been a challenge for business leaders and companies to determine the right salary by the roles and years of experience in this continuously evolving field.

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Key Highlights

• Overall: There has been a considerable growth in median salary to INR 16.8 lakhs per annum, up by 25.4% compared to last year.
• Distribution: The share of data science professionals in the INR 15-25 and 25-50 lakhs bracket grew significantly from 14.5% to 20.5% and 7.8% to 13.7% respectively, as compared to last year.
• City: Data science professionals in Bangalore command the highest median salary, at INR 19.1 lakhs per annum, followed by Mumbai at INR 17.5 lakhs per annum.
• Industry: Data science professionals in the Internet/eCommerce industry command the highest salary at INR 25.8 lakhs per annum, followed by Banking/Insurance at INR 24.3 lakhs per annum.
• Company Type: Data Science professionals in captives command the highest median salary compared to other company types, at INR 25.3 lakhs per annum.
• Education: Top-tier engineering undergraduates (IITs, NITs etc) earn a median salary of INR 27.6 lakhs per year, which is INR 8.2 lakhs more than their peers from other engineering colleges.
• Gender: The median salary gap between the male (INR 18.3 lakhs per annum) and female (INR 12.2 lakhs per annum) professionals in data science is INR 6.1 lakhs per annum.
• Roles: The top three roles in data science industry that command the highest salary are Data Architect (INR 25.6 lakhs per annum), Big Data Analyst (INR 20.0 lakhs per annum), and AI/ML Engineer (INR 17.8 lakhs per annum).
• Tools: Professionals with expertise in data science tools such as KubeFlow and MLFlow command a median salary of INR 26.0 lakhs per annum and INR 24.2 lakhs per annum

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Distribution of data science professionals across salary brackets

Companies generate a lot of data through multiple connected devices and process automation. It has become imperative for businesses to survive to use this data to their advantage. To harness the available data, organisations have been investing and hiring data science experts. A competent data science team can help companies solve problems around pricing, product development, forecasting models, etc.

As a result, the demand for experienced data science professionals is seeing an uptick. However, the industry feels there is a considerable dearth of high-quality data scientists.

Hence, the supply-demand dynamics has led to the share of data science professionals in the 15-25 and 25-50 lakhs bracket growing significantly from 14.5% to 20.5% and 7.8% to 13.7% compared to last year.

Subsequently, the share of data science professionals in the salary bracket of 0-6 lakhs per annum has decreased by 12.1pp.

The increasing demand for experienced data scientists and the subsequent lack of supply, has resulted in an increased share of professionals falling in higher salary brackets of 15-25 lakhs and 25-50 lakhs per annum.

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Salary trends by experience level

Compared to the previous year, the median salary for Data Science experts increased significantly across all experience levels.

Professionals in the brackets of (6-10 years) saw the highest growth in the salary of 55.5%, at INR 20.4 lakhs per annum. This was closely followed by the salary of professionals with 10-12 years and 3-6 years growing by 52.5% and 49.2%, respectively.

With 42.8 %, the salary growth for professionals with 0-3 years of experience is comparatively lower than professionals with 3-12 years of experience.

The increase for professionals with more than 12 years of experience was the lowest, at 25.2%, due to a higher salary base than other groups.

An annual salary growth of around 1.5 times across all the experience brackets signifies the rising importance of data science professionals throughout the ecosystem.

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Salary trends across cities

Bangalore emerged as a top destination for a data science professional to work with a median salary of INR 19.1 lakhs, followed by Mumbai at INR 17.5 lakhs per annum.

Bangalore is the startup capital of India as well as the IT and analytics hub offering the highest salary to data science professionals at INR 19.1 lakhs per annum. This city also offers the highest median salary across all experience levels.

Data science professionals in startups command higher salaries and Bangalore has seen rising number of startups in the last few years. Hence Bangalore overtook Mumbai in terms of median salary this year. However, Mumbai still maintains its second spot because of a higher cost of living.

The growth in salary is largely driven by Bangalore’s emergence as the top destination for AI and Analytics startups. According to industry reports, Bangalore housed more than 1050 startups in 2022, which is approximately 47% of India’s total AI and Analytics startups. Moreover, it employs approximately 36% of total data science professionals, which is the highest by any city in India.

Furthermore, all major IT and technology businesses with India operations, such as Infosys, Wipro, HP, Microsoft, Accenture, Oracle, and others, have offices in this city. These factors, when considered collectively, contributed to Bangalore’s first-place finish.

As the country’s financial capital, Mumbai has become the second favourite destination for data professionals. It housed a wide range of multinational corporations (MNCs) and old organisations that had made their fortune in the city.

The city has all the major offices for major domestic and international banks, financial institutions, consulting, and investment firms. A few are HDFC, RBI, SBI, Citibank, Standard Chartered Bank, Bain & Company, and others. In addition, it has head offices of many domestic conglomerates such as Reliance, Tata Group, Aditya Birla, and others.

Combined with the city’s greater cost of living, all these variables have placed Mumbai in second place on the list.

Data science professionals in Mumbai command a median salary of INR 17.5 lakhs per annum. In the last year, however, the city saw the lowest growth (of just 19.0%) in terms of the median salaries of its data science professionals.

Similarly, at INR 16.7 lakhs per annum, the median salary for data science professionals in Delhi NCR is the third highest in the country. It has become one of the top destinations for data science experts because of its strong infrastructure connectivity, competent workforce, and emerging AI startups ecosystem.

Hyderabad and Pune are ranked fourth and fifth with median annual salaries of INR 15.3 and 15.2 lakhs, respectively. Hyderabad saw the highest annual increase in data science salaries among all major cities in India at 31.5%.

Data science professionals’ salaries in Chennai are the lowest at INR 14.1 lakhs per annum. Even though Chennai has numerous analytics and data science startups, IT hubs, and captive centres, the lower cost of living lowers the median salary in Chennai.

Telangana’s effort in making Hyderabad among the top 25 AI hubs in the world is supported with competitive salaries that enterprises in the city are ready to offer to attract talent.

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Salary trends across industries

With a median salary of INR 25.8 lakhs per year, Internet/eCommerce data science professionals draw the highest salary in the sector. The growth in median salary is 104.4% on a Y-o-Y basis.

Customer interactions with sales and service representatives, transactions, websites, applications, and several other methods of communication have all contributed to data gathering in banking and insurance. So, to leverage available data for greater customer insights, strategy, fraud detection, price optimization, and other goals, data science is crucial. Thus, this industry is placed second, with median annual compensation of INR 24.3 lakhs.

Median salaries have been increasing significantly in sectors (Banking, Retail, etc) that have seen a high digital transformation after the pandemic.

The retail/CPG generates massive amounts of customer data through their sales, loyalty programs, point-of-sale purchases, mobile apps, eCommerce websites, and more. To take advantage of collected data, companies hire data science professionals who help companies get actionable insights to boost their overall revenue. Hence, this sector is placed in the third position with a median INR 24.2 lakhs per annum salary.

The immense amount of data generated by telecom operators across the country fueled the demand for data science professionals to manage and analyse large amounts of structured and unstructured data. The data science professionals help companies enhance network security, product and price optimisation, fraud detection, real-time analytics, prevent customer churn, and others through their analysis of available data. As a result, the telecom industry emerged as the fourth largest sector, with a median salary of INR 21.8 lakhs per annum.

Usage of Data Science enables health sector practitioners to serve their patients with more accurate diagnostic measures. In addition, there are multiple fields in healthcare, such as medical imaging, drug discovery, monitoring patient health, virtual assistance, tracking and preventing diseases, etc., where the role of data science is critical. Thus, it has created plenty of job opportunities for data science professionals in the sector; at the median salary of 19.5 lakhs per annum, this industry ranks fifth.

In India, websites and portals of energy and industrial companies generate more data than ever before. So, to optimise their generated data, companies are adopting big data analytics approaches. These approaches include theft detection, smart grid security, improving outage prediction, customer services, and others. Hence, with a typical compensation of INR 18.0 lakhs per year, this industry ranks sixth on the list

Other industries, such as travel/hospitality and media/entertainment offered median salaries of 14.9 and 17.6 lakhs per annum to analytics professionals to solve multiple data-driven challenges in the sector.

Industries like Travel/Hospitality that were worst hit by pandemic still need recovering from its after-effects, before they can invest in data science and offer competitive salaries.

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Salary trends across company types

Captive centres are Global Inhouse Centres (GICs) for large MNCs that have operations in India. It includes investment management companies like BlackRock, broad-based financial institutions like JP Morgan, Wells Fargo and American Express, and pharmaceutical companies like Merck and Pfizer. These companies have a portfolio of high-margin products and services targeted at global clients, markets, and customers. Thus, they provide the highest salary, at INR 25.3 lakhs per annum. These centres also witnessed the highest growth in median salaries on a Y-o-Y basis at 50.0%.

With an increasing footprint of global companies in India, captive centres of these organisations are seeing growth in their operations to run in-house data science and analytics functions. These companies have a portfolio of high-margin products and services targeted at global clients, markets, and customers and offer competitive salaries to attract the best talent.

Startups are recently established companies that are in their initial stages of growth and operations. They usually are working on problems that have not been solved before. In India, over the past year, startups such as Ola, Paytm, Flipkart, Razorpay, and others have provided significant raises to their data science professionals since they assist startups in collecting, analysing, and interpreting massive volumes of data to enhance operations and obtain a competitive advantage. Hence, the annual median compensation for experts in this field is INR 21.7 lakhs. Data Scientists with more than 12 years of experience working for startups earn significantly higher salaries (INR 56.3 lakhs per annum) than data scientists from any other company type.

Consulting firms help companies address problems that they can’t handle in-house. These firms comprise industry experts who provide professional advice, assistance, and actionable solutions to companies. In addition, these firms have large data science operations that provide data science as a stand-alone service or as part of a consulting package. Also, they often apply data science across the entire package to draw conclusions and provide recommendations for their clients. As a result, consulting organisations such as PwC, Deloitte, KPMG and McKinsey pay the third-highest compensation, at INR 19.1 lakhs per annum.

Domestic Indian firms are large conglomerate organisations like Reliance Industries, Godrej, Aditya Birla, and Bharti Airtel, which generate hundreds of millions of customer data points from their business operations. So, to get real-time actionable insights, these organisations have established dedicated data science units. Hence, this sector is placed in the fourth position with a median INR 17.6 lakhs per annum. The growth in the median salary is 31.5% compared to the previous year.

Higher rates of digital transformation in domestic firms has led to increased investments in data science and emerging technologies.

The Boutique Analytics firms are small to medium-sized service providers with a niche focus on analytics and related fields. These firms, which include the likes of Fractal Analytics, Ugam Solutions, Tiger Analytics, Mu Sigma, Latent View Analytics, among others, saw a considerable increase in their median salary as compared to last year. This is due to the lower overhead costs and competitive pricing of products and solutions. As a result, it ranked fifth among the best destinations for data science experts, with a median of INR 15.6 lakhs a year.

The IT firms are software development, outsourcing, website design, and any Services related to IT. Furthermore, these companies’ constant focus on digital transformation is largely responsible for the significant increase in the median wage of data scientists working there. Moreover, despite the pandemic’s severity, these companies have continued to simplify operations and improve customer and employee experiences by expanding investments in cloud, security, artificial intelligence, analytics, and other technology. IT companies offer a median salary of INR 13.1 lakhs per annum — a 28.8% Y-o-Y growth.

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Salary trends across education qualifications

In terms of salary trends by education level, MBA graduates from top-tier colleges command the highest median salary at INR 31.9 lakhs per annum, followed by undergraduates from top-tier engineering at INR 27.6 lakhs per annum. Professionals from a wider range of colleges earn INR 21.9 and 19.3 lakhs per annum for MBA and engineering graduates respectively.

The salary gap between MBA postgraduates from top-tier schools and other MBA colleges is highest in the 0-3 years, at 93.8 %. This number reduces to 53.9 % for students with 3-6 years of work experience, 40.2 % for 6 – 10 years, 44.9% for 10-12 years and just 25.2 % for 12 + years.

Similarly, the salary gap between the undergraduates from top-tier engineering colleges is highest at 0-3 years at 75.5%. This reduces to 73.8 %, 57.6 %, 34.4%, and 34.5% for the experience brackets of 3-6 6-10, 10-12, and 12+ years of experience.

The gap between top-tier institutes and other colleges is the highest for the lowest experience brackets. This reduces significantly with growth in the years of experience.

With the increased need for experienced and highly skilled professionals in Data Science, non-MBA graduates such as MCA, M.Tech, and others are also seeing a considerable increase in their median salary, which now stands at INR 18.3 lakh per annum—a 52.3% growth on a Y-o-Y basis.

Likewise, the median salary for PhD graduates has increased substantially, now standing at INR 26.2 lakhs per annum, up from INR 21.3 lakhs per annum last year. This is a 22.9% on a Y-o-Y growth.

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Salary trends by Gender

While the data science function has seen overall growth in salaries and capabilities, there is still a pay gap between men and women. It has continued the same trend for this year too.

Men command a median salary of INR 18.3 lakhs per annum, while women command a median salary of INR 12.2 lakhs per annum.

The gender salary gap is the highest at the 6-10 years experience bracket as men command a salary 36.6% greater than women. The second highest salary gap is 36.1% for the salary bracket of 10-12 years. The salary gap between the gender in the bracket of 3-6 years is 27.7%.

Men’s salaries grew by 25.1% over the last year whereas women’s salaries climbed by 21.3%. Hence, the already existing gap in their median salaries increased from INR 4.5 lakhs to 6.0 lakhs per annum.

Professional careers of women have been more affected by the pandemic than men and this is reflected in the increasing gender pay gap of data science professionals.

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Salary trends of data science roles

The median salary for data science professionals has seen significant growth in 2022. This growth is largely led by the increasing demand for data science experts by various industries to unlock the potential of available data with them. With that, the higher demand for qualified data science professionals played a crucial role in the overall increase in the median salary.

Roles like Data Architect, Big Data Analyst, and Data Engineer have also become pivotal for businesses as industries realise the importance of streamlining data pipelines for effective analysis or application development. Professionals in these roles are witnessing a significant jump in their median salary in 2022.

Roles like Data Architect are gaining importance as companies look to design effective pipelines for data gathering. These professionals usually work more at managerial levels and have considerable years of work experience.

The highest median compensation is earned by a Data Architect at INR 25.6 lakhs per year, while the lowest is INR 9.6 lakhs per year for a Data Analyst.

Big Data Analytics professionals saw a big jump in their median salaries of 35.2% Y-o-Y to command a median package of INR 20.0 lakhs per annum.

Similarly, AI/ML engineers and data engineers saw an annual jump of 21.8% and 13.2% to earn a median salary of INR 17.8 and 16.9 lakhs per annum.

Data engineers will continue to command more salaries and their dearth will be felt more than Data Scientists.

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Salary trends of other IT Roles

The impact of any function is highlighted by comparing the salaries of that function with those of the broader domain. For the Analytics function, the salaries earned by professionals continue to be higher than the salaries for other roles – underscoring the impact of analytics roles across organisations.

Software engineer salaries saw a big jump (44.0% Y-o-Y increase) in its median salary to INR 13.4 lakhs per annum. Despite this, the median salary for data science professionals, at INR 16.8 lakhs, is still 25.4% higher than that of a software engineer.

Similarly, the salary for a Data Science professional is 30.6% higher than that of an IT Developer (INR 12.9 lakhs per annum), and 45.3% and 61.0% higher than the salaries of a Java Developer (INR 11.6 lakhs per annum) and System Administrator (10.4 lakhs per annum) respectively.

Among all the IT roles considered, the median salary of DevOps was the highest at INR 16.2 lakhs per annum—3.6% lower than Data Science professionals’ median salary.

Roles in DevOps / MLOps will see a growing importance as enterprises look to improve successful deployment of their applications.

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Salary trends by tools

The highest median salary of INR 26.0 lakhs per annum for analytics and data science specialist is commanded by professionals working on Kubeflow. This is followed by MLFlow, Qlikview, Kubernetes at INR 24.2, 18.1, and 17.7 lakhs per year, respectively.

In the Cloud Computing space, professionals working on GCP (INR 17.4 lakhs per annum) earn more than those with AWS (INR 15.7 lakhs per annum) or Azure (INR 15.2 lakhs per annum).

Matlab earns the least, with a median annual salary of INR 9.8 lakhs per annum.

Framework tools for machine learning deployment or process streamlining are in a high demand as professionals working in it command the highest salaries.

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Download the complete report here