Money, money, money

It's vulgar to talk about, it's rude to bring up, it's a question without a good answer. Yet people keep asking (well, googling and reaching here): what's the money like in bioinformatics?

The average salary of bioinformaticians is, I guess, pretty similar to that of bench biologists. According to The Scientist's 2002 salary survey

the median income for academic positions in bioinformatics is $75,000. This is comparable to the numbers for clinical biologists and slightly better than the numbers for cell biologists.

This certainly seems to be the case in sunny California. The Silicon Valley Metro says that:

Salaries can range from $60,000 at the entry level to more than $100,000 for Ph.D.s. A recent salary survey [..] reported that the average salary in 2003 for life scientists whose primary area of specialization is bioinformatics was $75,845.

Here in the UK I'd suggest from experience that current starting salaries in bioinformatics are around £20,000 (~ $35,000), rising to around £30,000 (~ $53,000) with, say, five or six years experience - in academia, at least.

Add £2k or £3k per year (~ $4,000) to that if you're working for a charity or a research council, or £5k per year (~ $9,000) if you're working in the commercial sector (IT Jobs Watch lists an average salary of £37,500 for the bioinformatics jobs that it has listed in the past few months, most of which seem to be pharma related).

I don't think that having a PhD affects your starting salary much (feel free to correct me if you're an HR guru who knows otherwise), but a PhD (or lack thereof) will affect how quickly your salary reaches a ceiling. A masters degree might help you stand out from other jobseekers, but again it won't affect your salary much.

Those of you who have experience in the IT industry and who are looking to see how a switch to bioinformatics might affect your finances should bear in mind the wise words of James Tisdall when selling your services to biologists:

be prepared for them to have sticker shock when it comes to salaries. Maybe it's getting a little better now, but I've often found that biologists want to pay you about half of what you're worth on the market. Their pay level is just lower than that in computer programming.

My advice? As Lincoln Stein suggests, do it because you love it.