Data Scientist Salary in Richmond (2026)
The median annual wage for data scientists in Richmond, VA is $122,510, with a mean of $133,460 per the BLS OEWS May 2025 release. That is 5.3% above the national mean of $126,800 for the same occupation. The metro employs approximately 1,050 data scientists.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025 release.
How Richmond compares for data scientists
Richmond hosts CarMax, Capital One tech, and a growing federal-adjacent IT contractor base supported by Northern Virginia spillover.
Against the other US metros we track for this role, Richmond ranks #9 of 25 by mean annual wage. Here is how it stacks up against the closest peers:
| Metro | Mean wage | Median wage | Local employment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Richmond | $133,460 | $122,510 | 1,050 |
| Portland-Vancouver-Hillsboro | $134,940 | $129,600 | 1,700 |
| Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington | $129,320 | $129,780 | 3,250 |
| Austin-Round Rock-Georgetown | $126,830 | $127,360 | 3,730 |
| Denver-Aurora-Centennial | $125,040 | $112,520 | 4,510 |
What this number does and does not tell you
The BLS OEWS figures reflect wages for workers currently employed in the occupation across all employers, levels, and industries in the metro. The number includes entry-level analysts and senior staff. For most non-engineering tech roles, top-of-band roles at the leading employers in Richmond pay 25 to 60 percent above the metro mean reported here.
Three contextual things to know if you are pricing a role:
Total compensation usually exceeds the wage figure. BLS OEWS reports cash wages and salary only. It does not include employer-paid benefits, equity, signing bonuses, or commission for sales-tied roles. For roles with significant OTE (sales engineering, account management, RevOps) the on-target earnings figure can be 30 to 80 percent above the OEWS mean.
Hiring at the top of band is much faster than the average. The most aggressive data scientists hires in Richmond land roles above the local 90th percentile within 90 to 180 days of starting a focused search. The lever is target-list quality and credible artifacts, not application volume.
Remote roles re-anchor compensation. If you live in Richmond but accept a remote role at an SF or NYC company, total comp can clear $250K+ even when the OEWS local mean is much lower. Most AI-native companies (Anthropic, OpenAI, Mistral, Cursor, Perplexity) pay close to a single national band regardless of candidate location.
How to land a data scientist role in Richmond
The four-phase framework we run with clients pivoting into this role:
1. Pick 50 target companies, not 500. The companies hiring data scientists in Richmond are a finite, knowable list. Quality of the target list outperforms volume of applications by roughly 10x in this market.
2. Build 2-3 credible artifacts. The specifics vary by role, but every data scientist pitch needs concrete proof of work. A polished demo recording, a written project post-mortem, or a deployed side project are the standard credibility signals.
3. Outreach to named hiring managers, not anonymous job boards. Identify the hiring manager on LinkedIn for each of the 50 target companies. Send a personalized message that references something specific about their team or recent work.
4. Run multiple interview loops in parallel to create competing offers. A single offer is a price-taking position. Two offers is a price-setting position. The compensation delta from creating competing offers is typically larger than any other negotiation lever.
Want help landing a data scientist role in Richmond?
We have placed clients into named data scientist and adjacent roles with documented income lifts from $130K to $500K. Book a discovery call to see if your background is a fit.
Book a discovery callFrequently asked questions
The mean annual wage for data scientists in Richmond, VA is $133,460 as of the BLS OEWS May 2025 release. The median is $122,510. The metro employs approximately 1,050 workers in this role.
Richmond pays data scientists 5% above the national average. Among the 25 US metros we track, it ranks #9 of 25 for data scientist mean wages. Richmond hosts CarMax, Capital One tech, and a growing federal-adjacent IT contractor base supported by Northern Virginia spillover.
Data Scientists in Richmond earn a mean of $133,460 vs. the national mean of $126,800, a difference of +$6,660 (+5.3%). Median wages tell a similar story: $122,510 locally vs. $120,230 nationally.
BLS reports approximately 1,050 data scientists employed in the Richmond, VA metropolitan area as of the May 2025 OEWS release.
All figures are sourced directly from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) May 2025 release, published in 2026. We pull the data via the public data.bls.gov OESServices endpoint.
The fastest path is to combine credible artifacts (a polished demo or written post-mortem) with targeted outreach to 50 named hiring managers, not 500 random applications. Elevated Technologies runs this process end-to-end for clients pivoting into data scientists and similar non-engineering tech roles.