What Is The Average Help Desk Salary – And How Can I Beat It?

Would you like to know what the average pay is for help desk support? More critically, would you like to earn more than that? If so, good! Read on – I’ve got some advice to share.

Average Help Desk Salary

I’ve looked into the help desk salary statistics in several places and have found some numbers that you could be curious about. This image shows the various help desk roles from different sources, as well as the average salary:


Average Help Desk Salary, June 2012

Role - Source - Salary
Help Desk Analyst - Payscale.com - $ 52,566
Help Desk - Payscale.com - $ 51,160
Help Desk Operator - Payscale.com - $ 48,177
Help Desk Support - Salary.com - $ 46,169
Help Desk Specialist - Payscale.com - $ 43,909
Help Desk Technician - Indeed.com - $ 41,000


This demonstrates, that between the various roles and sources, the average help desk salary is between $41,000 and $52,566. Of course, this will vary on the organisation, the region or city you work in, and your experience. The above figures are all from US-based sites on US data, so your countries may vary.

Ok, So How Do I Earn More Than The Average Salary?

Well, I’m glad you asked! You’ve come to the right place! Not just to Complete IT Professional, where I assist information technology professionals improve their career (which often leads to earning more money), but this specific article too. There are several ways you can improve your salary working on the help desk.

The Best Way to Improve Your Help Desk Salary – Get Certified

Arguably the most effective way to get a better salary is to get certified. Working on a help desk will expose you to many technologies, both hardware and software.

The main companies in the information technology certification area all have certifications that are helpful to help desk staff – Microsoft, Cisco, CompTIA, ITIL.

Getting certified has two major benefits – it improves your knowledge on a specific technology or area of information technology, and makes you more proficient in doing your job. Obtaining a certification is a good way to prove to your employer that you have the required knowledge for the technology, and is a great way to get a improved salary!

Go Above And Beyond

If you’re working on a help desk, you’re likely to report to a manager or supervisor. A good way to get a salary increase working on the help desk is to go above and beyond your job description. You could do this by:

Volunteering for extra work – whether it is offered to you or not. This shows you’re taking initiative and are interested in helping others.
Become knowledgeable in a specific area of your job. You might become an expert in a specific technology or piece of software. You’ll be more valuable to the organisation because of this, and you could even share your knowledge with other team members to help them as well.
Suggest Ways To Improve Process – Just because a specific task is performed a certain way, doesn’t mean it has to stay that way. If you have ideas on how a certain process could be improved, then raise your hand and suggest them to your manager.

Ask For A Promotion

A great way to increase your help desk salary is to request a promotion. After you’ve been working at your job for a while, you maysays the average Help Desk Supervisor salary is $61,000). To get promoted can be a lot of work (I wrote a post recently on how to get a promotion at work), but you essentially need to prove you can do your own job very well, and improve your knowledge of the job you’re going for. Work hard and give the company a reason to promote you and with a bit of luck it should arrive.