Fraud Analyst Salary in 2027: What Each Source Reports

There’s no official fraud analyst salary, because the BLS doesn’t count fraud analysts as their own group. Its closest category, Financial Specialists, All Other, had a median of $81,100 in 2025. Job boards report less for the title itself, such as a $63,822 average on ZipRecruiter, and senior bank and fintech postings run well above that. Which number applies to you depends on the job you want.

What Does the Official Pay Data Say About Fraud Analysts?

O*NET, the U.S. Department of Labor’s occupation database, files fraud analysts under Fraud Examiners, Investigators and Analysts. Its wage box for that page is for Financial Specialists, All Other, not for fraud analysts alone. That category had a median of $81,100 a year, or $38.99 an hour, in 2025.

BLS data for May 2025 counted 132,130 jobs in the category and gives this spread.

The top of that range is about three times the bottom, so be careful with any single number. The state table below shows you how the median shifts by location, from $125,110 in the District of Columbia to $51,160 in Kansas.

Treat this as a rough guide, not a fraud analyst line, because the category holds other finance specialists too. Neighboring official categories show you where fraud work sits.

Why Do Fraud Analyst Salary Numbers Disagree?

Because each source measures something different, and you can’t compare them until you know what each one counts. Before you trust a figure, check these five things.

• The job title. PayScale lists three anti-money laundering titles with averages of $49,868, $55,000 and $67,732. Title wording alone moves the figure by thousands.

• The pay unit. PayScale and Indeed quote fraud analysts by the hour. ZipRecruiter and Robert Half quote a year.

• The date. PayScale’s Bank Fraud Analyst page shows $86,497, but it says the profiles were last updated in January 2024. Its Fraud Analyst page was updated in June 2026.

• The category. CareerExplorer’s fraud analyst salary page shows $81,100, the same number as the BLS category median above.

• The place. Fiserv’s posted range applies to New Jersey and New York. Intuit’s applies to the Bay Area. Neither tells you what a fraud analyst earns in Kansas.

What Do Job Sites and Salary Guides Report for Fraud Analysts?

Each source uses its own title and basis, so the main ones sit side by side.

Robert Half says its benchmarks come from pay for professionals it placed nationwide, checked against job-posting data. You’re looking at a staffing-firm view, which leans toward employers hiring through recruiters.

If you want to compare the hourly sources with the official median, note that $81,100 a year is $38.99 an hour. PayScale’s $23.17 and Indeed’s $25.20 sit well below that, and you’d expect it because the category includes senior specialists in other fields.

What Are Employers Paying for Fraud Analyst Jobs?

Posted ranges are the most honest numbers available, because an employer wrote each one for a real job. They are examples, not averages, and each belongs to a place and a seniority level.

Heartland’s page adds that starting pay typically falls between the minimum and the midpoint, and it asks for a high school diploma or GED with banking experience.

Fiserv asks for 3 or more years plus Python and Structured Query Language (SQL) skills, and Intuit asks for 3 to 5 years. The pay gap you see in the table is mostly a seniority and skills gap. That’s why our fraud analyst career guide spends so much time on how you climb from entry level.

How Does Federal Pay for Fraud Analysts Work?

Many federal analysts are paid on the General Schedule (GS), a fixed table of grades and steps published by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). The Treasury’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service posted its fraud analyst job in the 1805 Investigative Analysis series. The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) hires financial intelligence analysts across grades 9 to 13.

Location matters here. OPM’s table for Washington-Baltimore-Arlington includes a 33.94% locality payment. The grades in these postings pay as follows in 2026.

Without locality pay, base rates run lower. GS-9 covers $52,727 to $68,549. At GS-12, you’d see $76,463 to $99,404.

FinCEN’s posting listed $70,623 to $158,322 across the grades it covered. It said no prior federal experience was required. Each grade asks you for a year of specialized work at the grade below, so the climb takes time. Pay tables are on OPM’s General Schedule page and its Washington-Baltimore-Arlington table.

How Much Do AML Analysts Make?

If you take an AML analyst job, you’ll review alerts for signs of money laundering and prepare reports for regulators. You’ll work under the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA), which FinCEN says is sometimes called an AML law or jointly BSA/AML, so you’ll see postings written both ways. Our AML analyst career guide covers the duties.

There’s no official AML analyst line either. The Financial Specialists, All Other group covered earlier is the closest match. Compliance Officers, a near neighbor for AML compliance work, had a median of $80,730 in May 2025. The lowest tenth earns $48,220 and the highest tenth earns $133,720. Other sources report these figures.

Read that table for patterns, not for a single answer. A plain AML Analyst title, an entry-level one and a senior one sit far apart, and the New York figure rests on only 9 profiles. The range is wide, and your title, experience and city decide where you land inside it.

What Moves a Fraud Analyst’s Pay?

Four things show up again and again in the sources, and you can influence most of them.

Title and Seniority

Robert Half’s fraud analyst range runs from $70,000 for someone new to the role to $99,000 for someone with extensive experience, advanced skills and often specialized certifications. PayScale sees the same slope by the hour. Analysts with under a year of experience average $19.03. Those with 1 to 4 years average $22.77.

Employer Type and Skills

A small bank posting and a payments company posting can sit far apart, even with similar titles, because the work differs. Fiserv wants Python and SQL, plus experience building fraud prevention rules. The ACFE’s 2024 compensation insights say demand has grown for specialized roles such as data analytics, cyberfraud prevention and forensic accounting. If you can write a query, you’re competing for the higher rows in the posted pay table.

Credentials

The ACFE’s Compensation Guide reports a 32% premium for CFEs over non-certified colleagues. It also found median pay of $101,000 for CFEs with a four-year degree and $112,000 for CFEs with a graduate degree.

Those numbers come from the 2024 Global Salary Survey, which drew 4,449 usable responses from CFEs and associate members. They cover the whole anti-fraud field, not only analysts, so use them as a signal.

Employers mention credentials in postings, too. You’ll see that Fiserv lists a fraud certification from the Association of Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialists (ACAMS) or the ACFE as great to have.

Federal Grade

On the federal side, grade drives pay. You move up by showing a year of specialized work at the grade below, so document your analytic work early.

How Does Fraud Analyst Pay Compare With Related Jobs?

Robert Half prices three related titles in the same guide, which makes for a clean comparison.

Pay lines up closely across the three, so your choice depends more on the work you want than on the paycheck. For the investigator side, see our fraud investigator salary guide. For the examiner path, see our fraud examiner salary guide, and for compliance work, read our compliance officer salary guide.

How Can You Raise Your Fraud Analyst Salary?

Start with what you can price. A credential has a cost you can look up before you commit, and these programs publish theirs, so you can plan around them.

Murray State University offers a fully online graduate certificate in forensic accounting. It’s 9 credits, and the total tuition is $5,454. The school says you can finish in as few as 8 to 10 months. Fraud Analytics is one of your courses.

Southern New Hampshire University charges you $354 a credit for its fully online bachelor’s in accounting with a forensic accounting and fraud examination concentration, which runs 120 credits. If you’re on active duty, the military rate is $250 a credit.

Purdue University Global charges you $371 a quarter credit for its online bachelor’s in accounting and analytics with a forensic accountancy concentration. Current servicemembers get a 55% reduction, and veterans get 38%.

For the 11 bachelor’s programs we track with a published price, the median is $458 a credit. For the 6 graduate certificates with a published price, it’s $895 a credit. Our list of the cheapest forensic accounting degrees has 32 programs, and our graduate certificates list has 16.

Beyond school, three moves cost little. Learn SQL, because the senior postings name it. Work toward the CFE, since you can sit for the exam with 40 qualifying points. And apply to a mix of employer types, so you can compare real offers instead of averages.