Data Scientist Salary in Kenya, With Sources

McTaba runs coding and data bootcamps in Kenya. This guide is written to be useful whether or not you ever join one.

Imagine a candidate in Westlands holding two numbers from two websites. One says KES 31,000 a month. The other says KES 299,000. Neither is a typo. They measure different people in different ways, and this page shows how.

We found no Kenya National Bureau of Statistics table for data scientists, and no recruiter pay guide we could open. So the evidence is salary-survey sites. For the wider career, start with the data science career guide for Kenya. The figures follow.

Source	What it reports	Sample
Paylab, data scientist	80% earn KES 51,664 to 195,546 gross a month. Full range KES 41,789 to 351,012. Average after 5 years KES 140,933.	Fewer than 20 verified respondents
Payscale, data scientist	Average base KES 380,000 a year (about KES 31,667 a month). Last updated 9 August 2026.	60 profiles
Payscale, early career (1 to 4 years)	Average total pay KES 400,000 a year.	40 salaries
Payscale, entry level (under 1 year)	Average total pay KES 972,106 a year, which is higher than the early-career figure and so looks noisy.	12 salaries
Levels.fyi, data scientist, Kenya	Median total pay KES 299,537 a month, about KES 3.59 million a year. Middle half of salaries from KES 1,205,117 to 4,041,960 a year.	9 salaries

Sources: Paylab data scientist, Payscale data scientist and Levels.fyi data scientist Kenya, all checked on 3 November 2026. Monthly Payscale and annual Levels.fyi equivalents are our division and multiplication. Paylab is gross pay, before tax. Levels.fyi counts total compensation, which can include bonuses and stock.

If you want a path into the role, see the Data Science to AI Engineering programme.

The gap between the lowest and highest source is roughly tenfold. Three things explain most of it.

• Tiny samples. Paylab has fewer than 20 verified respondents, Levels.fyi has nine salaries, and Payscale's entry-level line has twelve (Levels.fyi, checked on 3 November 2026). One high earner moves a small average a long way.
• Different people in the sample. Levels.fyi collects from people who report on a tech pay site. Its page does not say who the nine are, so we cannot tell whether they work for Kenyan employers or for foreign firms from Nairobi. Treat it as the top of a range, not a typical offer.
• Different measures. Base pay, gross pay and total pay are three things. Payscale's own early-career total (KES 400,000 a year) is lower than its entry-level total (KES 972,106), which is a sign of noise (Payscale, checked on 3 November 2026).

A fourth site, Life Indexed, shows an average of KES 2,343,500 a year for 2026 and credits KNBS earnings data (Life Indexed, checked on 3 November 2026). We could not trace that figure to a KNBS table, and the page does not explain its method, so we leave it out of the table.

The ads do not print pay, but they show what the employer expects. Of the 15 data scientist ads we read on MyJobMag, 14 accepted a bachelor's or HND and four listed a master's level. One consultancy post, at IDinsight, asked only for a master's or PhD. The middle lower bound on years asked was 3.5 (MyJobMag data scientist search, checked on 3 November 2026).

Banks, insurers and lenders posted several of them: Britam, Co-operative Bank, Gulf African Bank, I&M Bank, CIC Insurance and Pezesha among them (MyJobMag, checked on 3 November 2026). Who posts is in our look at where data jobs are posted, and the tools are in what Kenyan employers ask for.

If your question is the analyst's pay instead, read the data analyst salary page. For the top end of the machine learning field, see the AI engineer salary data, and for a software comparison what software developers earn in Kenya.

1. Do not plan your life around one figure. The range across sources is the honest finding.
2. Ask each employer for the band early, and ask whether it is gross, base or total.
3. Expect the first role to be priced like an analyst role. Many scientist ads ask for years of experience, so moving up in stages is common.
4. Build a project they can check. See the portfolio projects that get interviews.

No school can promise a job or a salary. The Data Science to AI Engineering programme starts on 11 January 2027, and its first cohort has not begun, so we have no graduate pay to show. Read the Data Science to AI Engineering syllabus and compare it with the ads above.