The position classification standard that tells the federal government how to grade an intelligence analyst job was issued in June 1960. Designated TS-28, it is still the published standard in July 2026, defining the GS-0132 Intelligence Series as work in “the collection, analysis, evaluation, interpretation, and dissemination of information” bearing on national security.

That fossil previews what you find when you go looking for an intelligence analyst salary. The General Schedule side is documented to the dollar. The contractor side is published nowhere: no BLS survey, no OPM table, no ODNI release prices a cleared analyst working for a company. That asymmetry is why most salary pages about this job quote a number belonging to a different occupation.

What does a federal intelligence analyst actually earn in 2026?

Short answer: If the job is paid on the General Schedule, exactly what the published table says for the grade, step and locality assigned. In the Washington-Baltimore area in 2026 that runs from $70,623 at GS-9 step 1 to $169,279 at GS-15 step 1, with a hard statutory ceiling of $197,200.

The 2026 General Schedule incorporates a 1% across-the-board increase effective January 2026. Base rates are the starting point, and nobody is paid them. Locality pay is added on top; the Washington-Baltimore-Arlington percentage is 33.94%, and that is where most cleared analytic work sits.

Source: OPM Salary Table 2026-DCB, retrieved 21 July 2026.

The caveat most pay articles skip: the GS tables price the grade, not the job. They do not tell you what grade a given analyst position is classified at, how many analysts sit at each grade, or what an agency will offer. Grade-to-dollar is published fact. Job-to-grade is a black box.

The FBI makes this concrete. Its intelligence analysts are paid on the General Schedule, but the Bureau does not disclose your grade until the conditional job offer, which per FBIJOBS.gov states position title, GS pay grade and salary, after a background investigation including a personnel security interview, polygraph, drug test and fingerprinting. You learn the salary after months of qualifying for it.

Other agencies are worse, for a reason deeper than disclosure. 10 U.S.C. 1601 lets the Secretary of Defense establish defense intelligence positions “as positions in the excepted service” and fix their pay “without regard to the provisions of any other law relating to the appointment, number, classification, or compensation of employees.” NSA, DIA, NGA and NRO analysts sit there. Their pay is not GS pay that goes unpublished — it is set under a separate authority, so every GS figure here proxies what they earn rather than reporting it. A defensible proxy, since 10 U.S.C. 1602(a) holds those rates to the same maximum-pay limits binding DoD generally, so $197,200 still caps the top. CIA sits outside Title 10 entirely, and none of the five publish comparable figures this research could verify. A confident CIA starting-salary band on a career blog did not come from the agency. The federal-versus-company comparison is covered in government contract jobs vs. federal jobs.

Why does every salary page quote $93,790 for this job?

Short answer: Because it is the only wage figure the federal statistical system publishes near this occupation, and it is not this occupation. It belongs to SOC 33-3021, Detectives and Criminal Investigators. Analysts are filed underneath and get no wage series of their own.

O*NET carries Intelligence Analysts as detail code 33-3021.06. Every wage line on that page points upward: median, employment and industry data, all for Detectives and Criminal Investigators. Neither BLS nor O*NET publishes a separate wage for it. So a site printing “$93,790” under an intelligence analyst headline is quoting a 114,430-worker aggregate BLS never splits. How many are analysts is published nowhere; the code’s title and definition belong to detectives and criminal investigators.

The parent distribution, read as what it is. For SOC 33-3021 in the 2025 BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics estimate, the figures run: 10th percentile $55,390; 25th percentile $69,330; median $93,790; 75th percentile $120,520; 90th percentile $160,540. That spread describes federal-adjacent investigative work. It says nothing about a GEOINT analyst in Springfield.

The outlook cuts against these pages’ optimism. O*NET reports 117,900 employed in 2024, 117,100 projected for 2034, and growth in the “Decline (-1% or lower)” band. Its summary page also shows 7,800 projected job openings — a trap, because O*NET’s own trends page prints the word the summary drops: “annual.” That is a yearly average, roughly 78,000 across the decade. Parent occupation, not analysts. But a declining parent is no reason to assume an expanding detail code.

How much does the metro change the number?

Short answer: At GS-13 step 1 in 2026, the distance between $121,785 and $106,437. Locality percentages across the six pay areas where cleared analytic work concentrates range from 33.94% in Washington-Baltimore down to 17.06% in Rest of U.S. Same grade, same duties, materially different deposit.

Source: OPM 2026 General Schedule locality pay tables, retrieved 21 July 2026.

Two of those rows are not metros. OPM heads the Hawaii table “State of Hawaii,” and Rest of U.S. is the residual catch-all for everywhere outside a defined locality area — a floor rather than a city, and where much non-metro cleared work sits. Read it against rent, not pride: whether a Huntsville GS-13’s $110,847 beats a DC GS-13’s $121,785 depends on the housing market at the other end.

What do contractors pay all-source, SIGINT, GEOINT and CI analysts?

Short answer: Nobody knows, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling an estimate. No federal statistical source breaks analyst pay out by discipline, and no published survey of cleared contractor salaries exists at BLS, OPM or ODNI. The mechanism is knowable; the number is not.

The discipline-by-discipline salary table is the most common thing published about this job and the least defensible. All-source, SIGINT, GEOINT and counterintelligence analysts have no separate wage series or SOC codes. Whatever breakdown you have seen came from self-reported submissions to a crowd-sourced aggregator, not a statistical survey. Check its sample size before quoting it in a negotiation.

What can be established is how a contractor’s cost of employing you relates to what it bills. FAR 31.203 requires contractors to accumulate indirect costs by logical groupings and allocate a pro rata share across the base. Your salary is the direct cost. Fringe, overhead, G&A and fee stack above it until you reach a billing rate. That stack is the wrap, broken down in wrap rate explained.

You can anchor the first layer with published data, carefully. BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation for Q1 2026 puts private-industry total compensation at $46.60 per hour worked: $32.60 in wages and salaries and $14.01 in benefits. Divide $14.01 by $32.60 and you get 0.430: employer benefit costs run about 43% on top of salary.

Four caveats on that 43%. It is arithmetic on two published BLS series, not a wrap rate anyone publishes. It covers all private-industry workers, not defense contractors or cleared professionals; BLS returned no data for the management and professional cut. It is fringe only; overhead, G&A and fee are absent. Cleared programs often carry heavier fringe than average. The figure gives the direction of one layer; it does not let you back-solve a salary from a billing rate.

What moves a contractor offer is narrower and duller than discipline: the labor category you are slotted into, the clearance and polygraph the contract requires, the locality, and what is left in the task order. Clearance status gates all of it, which is why the difference between debriefed, inactive, current and active shows up in offer letters as dollars, and why what a security clearance is worth is the companion question. The premium a full-scope polygraph commands is widely assumed and nowhere published.

Why does contractor analyst pay get reset every few years?

Short answer: Because the contract does. When a vehicle goes up for recompete, the winning bidder proposes a new compensation plan for the same work, and the government explicitly evaluates whether it pays less than the incumbent did.

FAR 52.222-46 is the clause that makes this visible. It requires offerors to “submit a total compensation plan setting forth salaries and fringe benefits proposed for the professional employees who will work under the contract.” It then instructs that proposals “envisioning compensation levels lower than those of predecessor contractors for the same work” be evaluated against program continuity and staff availability. Compensation that is “unrealistically low,” the clause says, “may be viewed as evidence of failure to comprehend the complexity of the contract requirements,” and can justify rejecting the bid outright.

Read that clause for what it concedes: the government wrote a rule against lowballing professional pay because that is what happens when a services contract is competed on price. Your salary is a line in someone’s bid: defensible while the contract holds, renegotiable the moment it does not; the substance of incumbent capture, recompete and rebadge.

Who is actually buying analytic labor?

Short answer: Mostly DoD, through mid-size specialists as much as through primes. FY2025 obligations under product service code R423, professional intelligence support, were $415.5 million at DoD, $58.3 million at Treasury and $17.1 million at DHS.

By recipient, the FY2025 R423 leaders were Altamira Technologies $53.9 million, Radiance Technologies $49.6 million, Modern Technology Solutions $35.2 million and CACI Inc.-Federal $34.2 million. Individual vehicles get larger, on a measurement basis worth naming first. Award H9240219C0006 to Actionable Solutions Group carries $233,239,769.53 and H9240221C0005 to CACI Inc.-Federal carries $190,689,350.11 — total values across each contract’s full period of performance, 2019-2026 and 2021-2026, not FY2025 money. The gap is the lesson. Actionable Solutions Group’s entire FY2025 R423 obligations came to $16.5 million, roughly a fourteenth of its $233 million headline. A ceiling is lifetime capacity, not this year’s payroll; the annual obligation is what funds a labor category.

One firm limit. R423 is one product service code among many that buy analytic labor; much intelligence support is bought under other codes or not publicly reported at all. Treat the USAspending figures as proof the market is real and a roster of who competes in it, never as total intelligence spending or a headcount. How to read a DoD contract award covers checking the contract that funds your labor category.

Which side actually pays better, the agency or the company?

Short answer: On raw salary the question is unanswerable, because only one side publishes. On everything around the salary the federal side has advantages easy to underweight next to a single offer number.

We run a cleared job board whose inventory skews toward contractor roles, so take this as a statement against interest. The federal side wins on four things that never show up in an offer comparison. A FERS pension, a defined benefit no contractor 401(k) reproduces. Step increases that arrive without negotiating. A pay table you can read before you apply. And a GS salary cannot be cut because a recompete went badly, the risk FAR 52.222-46 exists to police on the other side.

The contractor side has real advantages, and honesty cuts both ways: you can change employers without changing the work, and no statutory ceiling equivalent to Level IV applies. What you give up is predictability. The federal ceiling is low and knowable. The contractor ceiling is unknowable, which is not the same as high.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is $93,790 the average intelligence analyst salary?

No. That is the 2025 BLS median for SOC 33-3021, a 114,430-worker occupation named for detectives and criminal investigators and reported as one block. Intelligence Analysts sit beneath it as O*NET detail code 33-3021.06, for which neither BLS nor O*NET publishes a separate wage.

What GS grade are intelligence analyst jobs?

There is no single answer, and that is the point. Federal intelligence work is classified to the GS-0132 Intelligence Series, but the grade is set position by position. The FBI reveals grade and salary only in the conditional job offer, after the background investigation and polygraph.

Do contractors pay intelligence analysts more than the government?

Unknown from any published source, and that answer is more useful than a fabricated band. The GS-paid federal side is priceable to the dollar from the 2026 tables. The contractor side has no survey at BLS, OPM or ODNI. Only the mechanism is documented: FAR 31.203 governs how indirect costs stack above your salary, FAR 52.222-46 how that salary is re-proposed at every recompete.

Will federal intelligence analyst pay keep rising through 2027?

Only to a point, and the point is published. Locality-adjusted GS pay is capped at the rate for Level IV of the Executive Schedule under 5 U.S.C. 5304(g)(1), which is $197,200 in 2026. In the Washington-Baltimore locality that cap already binds at GS-15 step 6, so steps 6 through 10 all pay the identical $197,200. A DC-area analyst can map every raise available between now and the top of the scale, and the map ends. Past that point the only variable left is which side of the fence you stand on.