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Computer systems analysts

Also called Systems analyst, Business systems analyst, IT systems analyst, Sr systems analyst, Senior systems analyst

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 519,530 US computer systems analysts, with median pay of $105,850 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2021, the May 2025 count is the highest. The earliest figure here is a Census count of 100,000 from 1970, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for computer systems analysts: Cloud platforms and SaaS integration, 2015 to 2022.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects employment to grow 7.9% from 2025 to 2035.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

AI exposure studies

Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. BLS publishes these counts as yearly survey snapshots and cautions against reading them as a precise trend.

Last updated .

Cite this page
APA

Future History. (2026, October 11). Computer systems analysts: jobs and pay since 1970 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/15-1211

Chicago

Future History. "Computer systems analysts: jobs and pay since 1970." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/15-1211.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_15_1211, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Computer systems analysts: jobs and pay since 1970}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/15-1211}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }

The access date is today's date on your device.

drag to travel through time
19752000now
Country
2026
Known then as Systems Analyst / Systems Engineer (emerging corporate computing role)
Known then as Systems Analyst / Business Systems Analyst (mainframe and minicomputer era)
Known then as Systems Analyst / Computer Systems Analyst (PC and ERP era)
Known then as Computer Systems Analyst / IT Systems Analyst / Business Analyst (SOC 15-1051 era)
Known then as Computer Systems Analysts (BLS SOC 15-1211, 2018 SOC revision)
Known today as Computer Systems Analysts (BLS SOC 15-1211, 2018 SOC revision)
Projected to still be called Computer Systems Analysts (BLS SOC 15-1211, 2018 SOC revision)
Data from the May 2025 survey
US Employment
520K

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic
Report an error
Median Annual Wage
$105,850

≈ $103,136 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic
Report an error
Beat · 1963

The New York Times publishes "Systems Analysis New Profession" (August 4, 1963), noting that the role has grown out of the "mountain of paper work" facing business executives. Miami University launches the first academic program in systems analysis in 1963, with 125 enrolled students and 15 declaring the major. The program chair L.J. Prince observes that computers are now sophisticated enough to handle routine tasks, enabling analysts to model and evaluate systems strategically rather than performing routine data processing themselves.

Beat · 1964

IBM announces the System/360 mainframe family on April 7, 1964, the first computer product line to use interchangeable software and peripheral equipment across the full range from small to large machines. The System/360's design philosophy requires a new class of IBM customer-facing professional, called Systems Engineers, who understand both the technology and the customer's business well enough to design implementations. The SABRE airline reservation system, developed with American Airlines from 1957 to 1964, is an early landmark: it required analysts who could simultaneously understand airline operations, IBM hardware constraints, and real-time transaction processing logic.

Beat · 1979

Tom DeMarco publishes "Structured Analysis and System Specification," introducing data flow diagrams (DFDs) as a standard notation for documenting how information moves through a business system. DeMarco's book, alongside Edward Yourdon's concurrent work, transforms systems analysis from a craft into a semi-formal discipline with shared visual notation. For the first time, analysts can produce a specification deliverable (a DFD set, an entity-relationship diagram, a data dictionary) that another analyst can critique, extend, or hand off to a programmer for implementation.

Beat · 1992

SAP launches R/3, a client-server ERP platform, transforming what systems analysts do. Rather than designing custom systems from scratch, analysts now spend much of their careers configuring, customizing, and integrating pre-built SAP modules. The R/3 wave drives a decade-long employment boom for analysts: every major corporation in the world runs multi-year SAP, Oracle, or PeopleSoft implementation projects, each requiring large teams of analysts who know both the business process and the platform's specific transaction codes and data model.

Beat · 1999

The Y2K remediation effort creates the largest single employment surge in the history of the computer systems analyst occupation. Every organization running date-sensitive legacy systems, banks, hospitals, utilities, government agencies, manufacturers, needs teams of analysts to audit, rewrite, and test their systems for year-2000 compliance. Employment in the analyst category likely peaks in 1999-2000. When the Y2K work ends and the dot-com contraction begins in 2001, analyst employment drops sharply for two years before recovering on the strength of post-Sarbanes-Oxley compliance work and the ERP upgrade cycle.

Beat · 2001

The dot-com contraction and the winding-down of Y2K remediation projects simultaneously hit IT analyst employment. BLS data shows the occupation at 463,300 in 2000, declining in the years that followed before recovering on the strength of Sarbanes-Oxley compliance implementations (SOX was signed into law in July 2002, requiring extensive IT controls documentation and testing across public companies) and the broader ERP upgrade cycle.

Beat · 2018

The 2018 SOC revision reorganizes the computer occupations group. Computer Systems Analysts receives the new code 15-1211, replacing the prior 15-1051. The revision also creates new codes for several specialized roles that had previously been lumped with analysts or developers, including Information Security Analysts (15-1212) and Computer Network Architects (15-1241). The occupational boundaries become cleaner but also narrower: the 2018 SOC 15-1211 is more purely the systems-analysis-and-integration function, without some adjacent scientific computing roles that were counted in predecessor codes.

How to read this number

OEWS is a point-in-time survey snapshot, not a continuous time series; BLS advises against using it for year-over-year trend comparison.

Each dot is a cited figure over time; the dotted line only links them (values between aren't measured). Hollow dots are estimates.

Official statistic: Copied by a script from a statistics agency table or a published study's table, not retyped by hand. BLS figures and the forecast and exposure tables are also re-checked against that table on every data run. Researched context: Researched from the cited source rather than copied from it by a script, so it is not machine-checked yet. Spot a mistake? Each figure has a “Report an error” link.

Cited forecasts · present → 2035

Will AI replace computer systems analysts? What the research says

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than an average.

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, the spread is the honest signal.

What published forecasts say
Forecast change in the number of people doing this work, as published by each named source. Bars share one scale on every role, centred on zero and reaching the end at ±30%. Grey marks a small change, 3% or less either way.
BLS Employment Projections 2025-35
→ 2035
+7.9%
BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 15-1211 (Computer systems analysts): 544.4 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 587.2 thousand in 2035, a change of +42.9 thousand (+7.9%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers (2.6% of this occupation in 2025). The average for all occupations in this cycle is +3.5%.
Official statisticReport an error
How exposed is this work to AI (research measures)
Scores as published by each study. Each row says what it measures. These measure what AI could technically do, not forecasts of jobs lost.
Eloundou et al. (2023), "GPTs are GPTs"
2023 study · Share of tasks exposed to LLMs (β, human-rated)
47.1%
of tasks
What this measures

Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 15-1211.00 Computer Systems Analysts. Shown: human-rated β = 0.471, the share of the occupation's tasks an LLM could do in at least half the time at equal quality, counting tasks that need LLM-powered software at half weight (β = E1 + 0.5 × E2). Other published measures for this occupation: human-rated α (LLM alone) 0.118 and γ (all LLM-assisted) 0.824; GPT-4-rated β 0.75. This measures how much of the work an LLM could touch, not how many jobs disappear.

Official statisticReport an error
Today, in this role

What's changing day to day for computer systems analysts

Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.

AI is sitting alongside you hereMap and analyze current-state business processes using AI-powered process mining platforms (Celonis) that auto-discover how processes actually run from ERP/CRM event logs, reviewing AI-surfaced bottlenecks, validating root-cause diagnoses against operational context, and translating findings into actionable redesign proposals for stakeholders.

Map and analyze current-state business processes using AI-powered process mining platforms (Celonis) that auto-discover how processes actually run from ERP/CRM event logs, reviewing AI-surfaced bottlenecks, validating root-cause diagnoses against operational context, and translating findings into actionable redesign proposals for stakeholders.[12],[6],[13]

Where your edge is

Invest in process intelligence interpretation skills: Celonis surfaces what is happening in a process; the analyst must explain why it matters, what the organizational and political root causes are (beyond the data), and which improvement levers are actually within scope to pull, this diagnostic and persuasion layer is the analyst's enduring differentiator.

AI is sitting alongside you hereTranslate Agile and Scrum backlog items from business requirements into technically scoped tickets: using Atlassian Rovo Agents to auto-generate epics and user stories in Jira from PRD content in Confluence, then reviewing ticket scope, acceptance criteria, and dependency linkages with engineering teams to ensure stories are developable as written.

Translate Agile and Scrum backlog items from business requirements into technically scoped tickets: using Atlassian Rovo Agents to auto-generate epics and user stories in Jira from PRD content in Confluence, then reviewing ticket scope, acceptance criteria, and dependency linkages with engineering teams to ensure stories are developable as written.[14],[15]

Where your edge is

Develop ticket quality judgment: Rovo Agents generate syntactically correct Jira tickets quickly, but the analyst must validate that acceptance criteria are testable, dependencies are surfaced, and story scope is genuinely developable in a sprint, the human review step is where "good-looking documentation" becomes "engineering can actually build this."

AI is sitting alongside you hereGather, validate, and structure business requirements by facilitating stakeholder interviews and workshops, then using AI-assisted tools (Atlassian Rovo, ChatGPT, Claude) to draft BRDs and functional specifications from raw meeting notes, reviewing, editing, and owning the final documents for accuracy, completeness, and alignment with organizational constraints.

Gather, validate, and structure business requirements by facilitating stakeholder interviews and workshops, then using AI-assisted tools (Atlassian Rovo, ChatGPT, Claude) to draft BRDs and functional specifications from raw meeting notes, reviewing, editing, and owning the final documents for accuracy, completeness, and alignment with organizational constraints.[7],[8],[16]

Where your edge is

Shift from document authorship to requirements governance: use AI drafts as a structured starting point, but invest your effort in validating stakeholder alignment, surfacing hidden constraints (regulatory, legacy-system, political), and owning the sign-off process, the judgment layer that turns a technically correct BRD into one stakeholders will actually commit to.

Where computer systems analysts go next

Natural next steps for someone with your foundation: not exits, evolutions.

What each move takes

Senior systems analysts who accumulate cross-functional credibility, budget exposure, and vendor relationship management experience naturally grow into IT management. The 2026 market specifically demands IT managers who can set AI governance strategy for enterprise deployments, evaluate SAP Joule and Salesforce Agentforce for organizational ROI, and translate infrastructure investment decisions into board-level business outcomes: all skills that emerge from senior analyst careers.

What you'd add
· AI governance and strategy: evaluating agentic ERP deployments, defining human-oversight policies for autonomous enterprise workflows, vendor ROI assessment
· Executive communication: translating system integration complexity and AI deployment risk into business-impact language for C-suite and board audiences
· Certifications: PMP, ITIL 4 Managing Professional, or SAP Enterprise Architect credentials
What it takesA real upskill, but a natural one
Tools of the era

How has the work of computer systems analysts changed since 1963?

The tools that defined the work, one line per era. Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.

  • Flowcharts, punch cards, and COBOL (paper-based systems design era)

    The first systems analysts had no specialized software. They designed systems on paper: flowcharts drawn by hand documented business processes; COBOL programs were punched onto cards by data-entry operators; requirements were captured in written memos and specification binders. The analyst's tools were a pencil, a flowchart template, and the ability to translate a manager's verbal description of a business process into a logically sequenced set of operations the IBM 360 could execute. The lack of any software mediation meant that the analyst's primary skill was comprehension and documentation rather than configuration.

  • Structured analysis methods (SADT, DFDs, Jackson Structured Design)

    The mid-1970s brought the first formal methodologies for systems analysis: DeMarco and Yourdon published "Structured Analysis and System Specification" in 1979, introducing data flow diagrams (DFDs) as a standard notation for documenting how information moved through a system. Tom DeMarco's data dictionary and entity-relationship diagrams gave analysts a shared visual language. Michael Jackson's Jackson Structured Design (JSD) offered a systematic way to derive program structure from data structure. These methodologies transformed systems analysis from an art into a semi-formal discipline: for the first time, an analyst could produce a deliverable (a DFD set, an ERD, a data dictionary) that another analyst could critique, extend, or implement. The structured methods era coincided with the minicomputer revolution (DEC VAX, 1977) and the early personal computer era, bringing computing to mid-size businesses that required new rounds of systems analysis work.

  • CASE tools and ERP platforms (SAP R/2, Oracle Applications, BAAN)

    Computer-Aided Software Engineering (CASE) tools promised in the late 1980s to automate systems analysis and design: products like IEF (Texas Instruments), Rational Rose, and IDEF modeling tools allowed analysts to create process maps, entity-relationship diagrams, and data flow diagrams on screen rather than paper, generating code from models in some cases. The promise exceeded delivery: most CASE tools were expensive, difficult, and produced mediocre code. What genuinely transformed the analyst role in the 1990s was not CASE but ERP: SAP R/2 (mainframe) and then R/3 (client-server, launched 1992), Oracle Applications, BAAN, and PeopleSoft replaced the need to build custom systems from scratch. The systems analyst's work shifted from designing new systems to configuring, customizing, and integrating pre-built ERP modules. This was a profound change in the profession's character: instead of blank-page problem-solving, analysts spent much of the 1990s learning the particular logic of SAP transaction codes, Oracle flexfields, and PeopleSoft security tables.

    Effect on the work

    The ERP wave simultaneously drove an employment boom (every Fortune 500 company ran multi-year SAP or Oracle implementations requiring large analyst teams) and created a credential monoculture (SAP certification and Oracle DBA skills commanded substantial premiums, concentrating the market).

  • UML, Agile/Scrum, and web services (SOAP, REST API integration)

    The Unified Modeling Language (UML), standardized by the Object Management Group in 1997 and widely adopted through the early 2000s, gave systems analysts a new shared notation for object-oriented design. The Agile Manifesto (2001) and the rise of Scrum shifted the analyst's deliverable from heavyweight specifications (BRDs, functional requirements documents) toward lighter-weight user stories and sprint-level acceptance criteria. The web-services era (SOAP from 1998, REST popularized by Roy Fielding's 2000 dissertation) created a new integration workload: virtually every enterprise needed analysts who could design and troubleshoot connections between systems exposing APIs. The role adapted again: the "business analyst" title became widespread alongside "systems analyst," reflecting a split between analysts who focused on process and requirements (business analysts) and those who focused on technical integration design (systems analysts).

  • Cloud platforms and SaaS integration (Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow, iPaaS)

    The shift of enterprise software from on-premise to cloud SaaS changed the analyst's toolkit again. Salesforce CRM, Workday HCM, ServiceNow ITSM, and similar platforms offered point-and-click configuration interfaces that reduced the need for deep technical coding knowledge while increasing the premium on understanding the platform's data model and integration capabilities. Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) products like MuleSoft (acquired by Salesforce in 2018 for $6.5 billion), Boomi, and Workato emerged as the plumbing layer connecting a sprawling SaaS landscape.

    Effect on the work

    The SaaS wave sustained analyst employment despite fears that low-code platforms would reduce headcount: the proliferation of distinct SaaS products created more integration complexity than low-code tools could absorb, and headcount remained stable or grew modestly through the late 2010s.

  • Generative AI and agentic enterprise software (SAP Joule, Salesforce Agentforce, Atlassian Rovo, Celonis)

    Generative AI arrived at the core of the analyst workflow in two waves. First, tools like ChatGPT and Microsoft 365 Copilot began automating the most document-intensive parts of the job: drafting business requirements documents from meeting notes, generating user stories from PRDs, and creating test-case matrices from acceptance criteria. ArgonDigital reported approximately 50% reduction in requirements document creation time from AI assistance by 2025. Second, and more structurally significant, the major enterprise platforms began shipping autonomous AI agents: SAP launched dozens of Joule agents across S/4HANA and Ariba (SAP Sapphire 2026), Salesforce Agentforce shipped pre-built agent templates for sales, service, and marketing workflows, and Atlassian Rovo agents began generating PRDs and Jira tickets from Confluence content automatically. These agentic capabilities created a new analyst specialty: governing AI agent deployments, defining what actions agents are permitted to take, configuring human-override triggers, and auditing agent behavior against business policy. Gartner projects 40% of enterprise applications will include task-specific AI agents by end of 2026, up from less than 5% in 2025.

    Effect on the work

    BLS projects 8.7% employment growth for computer systems analysts from 2024 to 2034, reaching approximately 566,500 positions. The AI-augmentation wave is so far creating net analyst jobs rather than eliminating them: the complexity of governing agentic enterprise software requires more cross-functional human judgment than ever, and the analysts who combine traditional integration skills with AI governance fluency are in rising demand.

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Computer Systems Analysts employment and pay by year

On record since1963
Latest US employment519,530 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Latest US median pay$105,850 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Outlook+7.9% by 2035Source: BLS Employment Projections 2025-35Official statisticReport an error

In other countries

The latest figure each country's statistics agency publishes for this job. Each uses its own occupation definition, survey basis and currency, so the numbers are not directly comparable with each other or with the US figures.

  • Canada (NOC 21222)

    Employment, 2020
    131,890, Statistics Canada Census 2021 Official statistic Report an errorStatistics Canada Census of Population 2021: number of persons with employment income in NOC 21222 Information systems specialists, Canada, reference year 2020. A recipients basis (anyone with employment income during the year), slightly broader than a point-in-time employed count. Statistics Canada Open Licence.
    Median pay, 2020
    C$89,000, Statistics Canada Census 2021 Official statistic Report an errorStatistics Canada Census of Population 2021 (Table 98-10-0586): median employment income for NOC 21222 Information systems specialists, Canada, reference year 2020, full-year full-time workers (the basis comparable to the US OEWS full-time median). Statistics Canada Open Licence.

  • United Kingdom (UK SOC 2133)

    Employment, 2025
    168,000, ONS ASHE 2025 Official statistic Report an errorONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (Table 14): employee jobs in SOC 2133 IT business analysts, architects and systems designers, United Kingdom, 2025 (ASHE "number of jobs", thousands x1000; excludes self-employment). Open Government Licence v3.0.
    Median pay, 2025
    £59,593, ONS ASHE 2025 Official statistic Report an errorONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (Table 14.7a): median gross annual pay for all employee jobs in SOC 2133 IT business analysts, architects and systems designers, United Kingdom, 2025. Open Government Licence v3.0.

  • Australia (ANZSCO 2611)

    Employment, 2025
    45,800, ABS Labour Force Survey Official statistic Report an errorABS Labour Force Survey (Detailed), table EQ08: employed persons in ANZSCO 2611 ICT Business and Systems Analysts, national (summed across sex and state/territory), annual average of 4 quarterly estimates.
    Median pay, 2025
    A$140,244, ABS Employee Earnings May 2025 Official statistic Report an errorAnnualised (x52) from A$2,697 median weekly earnings. ABS Survey of Employee Earnings and Hours, May 2025: median pay for full-time non-managerial employees paid at the adult rate, before tax. Surfaced via the Jobs and Skills Australia occupation profile.
View all 11 years of cited US data, each linked to its source
YearUS employmentAnnual pay (median unless marked)SourceReport
1970100,000n/aDecennial Census 1970 Researched contextReport
1980243,000n/aBLS CPS 1981 Researched contextReport
1990455,000$37,000Decennial Census 1990 (employment) Researched contextBLS historical bulletin (pay) Researched contextReport
2000463,300$57,000BLS OEWS 2000 (employment) Official statisticBLS historical bulletin (pay) Researched contextReport
2019589,060$90,920BLS OEWS May 2019 Official statisticReport
2020574,450$93,730BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statisticReport
2021505,150$99,270BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statisticReport
2022505,210$102,240BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statisticReport
2023498,810$103,800BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statisticReport
2024497,800$103,790BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statisticReport
2025519,530$105,850BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statisticReport
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