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Labor Market Pulse
Oklahoma City, OK Metro Edition
Focus: IT
OKC unemployment climbs as cybersecurity pay breaks away from the pack.
4.2%
OKC metro unemployment rate
Up from 3.2% annual average in 2025
Significant increase
Cybersecurity Analyst pay movement
Metro median $100,718, outpacing other local IT roles
33%+
OK firms planning no 2026 wage increase
Up from 15% in 2023 (Kansas City Fed)
-0.7%
OKC professional & business services
State lost 2,200 jobs in sector over the year
This Month's Takeaways
Cybersecurity Analyst pay is moving fastest in the metro — intentionally.
Metro median advertised pay for Cybersecurity Analyst rose significantly this month to $100,718, outpacing most other IT roles tracked locally. That signals employers are front-running a widening skills gap rather than reacting to one, consistent with CompTIA's finding that cybersecurity job postings are growing 346% above the national occupational average.
Network Engineer pay softened even as national demand firmed.
Local Network Engineer advertised pay declined moderately while the national median climbed to $114,400, widening the metro-to-national gap. Motion Recruitment data showing network admin roles facing permanent demand compression nationally may be landing harder locally given the metro's slower overall hiring pace — a signal to recheck whether current postings reflect genuine scarcity or stale pay bands.
Professional services contraction may push IT consulting in-house.
Oklahoma City's professional & business services sector shed jobs for the year, mirroring a statewide 2,200-job decline, which typically compresses external IT consulting and systems integration demand. Enterprises leaning on contractors for non-core infrastructure work may find vendor pricing softening, while internal cloud and DevOps hiring becomes comparatively more attractive.
Data center expansion is a leading indicator, not yet a pay spike.
Google's Stillwater investment signals sustained local demand for cloud architecture, networking, and DevOps talent, but metro Systems Administrator pay has only moved up moderately so far. Compensation benchmarking should anticipate this demand before it fully shows up in advertised rates, not after.
Local Labor Conditions
Oklahoma City metro unemployment climbed to 4.2% in September, nearly a full point above year-ago levels, as professional & business services contraction (-0.7%) and manufacturing softness (-1.5%) signal enterprise budget caution outside of core tech roles. Google's $3 billion Stillwater data center build is pulling local demand toward cloud, networking, and infrastructure specialization even as broader hiring momentum cools, creating a bifurcated market where commodity IT roles stagnate and infrastructure-adjacent skills tighten.
Leadership & Talent Implications
Metro-level cooling gives IT leaders more leverage on headcount timing for commodity functions, but the Stillwater data center buildout and statewide forecast of computer/math occupations as the second-fastest-growing category through 2034 suggest infrastructure and cloud-adjacent roles will keep tightening regardless of the broader slowdown. Oklahoma firms' reluctance to raise wages broadly — over a third plan no 2026 increases per Kansas City Fed survey data — makes targeted retention spend on cybersecurity and cloud specialists more cost-effective than across-the-board increases. Consider reviewing whether current compensation structures create enough separation between high-demand infrastructure/security roles and flatter-demand support functions to prevent quiet attrition among your most mobile specialists.
