Live job-market report Data Analyst Updated today

Data Analyst Skills — What Job Posts Actually Ask For (2026)

Aggregated from live Data Analyst postings rather than opinion. Every figure below is measured from real adverts and recalculated daily.

2,513 live Data Analyst postings read
Hiring companies 1,677
Added this week 561
Posted in last 24h 20

What a Data Analyst actually does

A data analyst turns questions people are already arguing about into answers with a number attached — why churn moved last month, whether a change to the signup flow did anything, which of two markets deserves the next hire. In practice that means a lot of SQL against a warehouse someone else built, checking whether the answer survives being looked at a second way, and then presenting it to people who will act on it without reading the query. That last part is not a footnote: an analysis nobody acts on has failed, however correct it was.

The skills Data Analyst postings actually ask for

Aggregated from the live descriptions of postings whose title names the role. Not a shortlist, and not anybody's opinion of what matters.

  • sql 79.8%
  • analytics 70.2%
  • python 52.7%
  • power bi 44.5%
  • data analysis 40.4%
  • tableau 40.2%
  • artificial intelligence 37.4%
  • decision making 36.3%
  • excel 35.4%
  • problem solving 35.1%
  • data driven 34.7%
  • data quality 33.5%
  • cross functional 28.6%
  • strategy 26.5%
  • data science 25%
  • automation 24.8%

Share of Data Analyst postings mentioning the skill — a posting asks for many, so these do not add to 100. Measured across postings whose title is the role.

How much experience, and where you would work

Minimum experience asked for

  • 0-2 years 517 21%
  • 3-5 years 1,158 46%
  • 6+ years 235 9%
  • Not stated 603 24%

Work policy

  • Remote 605 24%
  • Hybrid 615 24%
  • On-site 408 16%
  • Not specified 885 35%

59 of those 605 remote Data Analyst roles are open to candidates anywhere in the world — the rest are remote within one country only. Most job boards do not separate the two.

What separates a senior posting from a mid-level one

The same skill list, split by the seniority of the posting asking for it. Bars run right where senior postings ask more often, left where mid-level postings do.

  • mentoring +16.4 pt
  • analytics +13.4 pt
  • artificial intelligence +11.6 pt
  • pipeline +11.5 pt
  • strategy +10.9 pt
  • supply chain -3.6 pt
  • data analysis -3.6 pt
  • power bi -7.4 pt
  • problem solving -9.8 pt
  • excel -13.1 pt

Percentage-point gap between the senior+ and mid-level shares naming each skill. Senior+ includes principal, staff and executive.

The skills that are asked for rarely — and are worth more for it

Everyone asks for the top of that first chart, so naming it proves nothing. These sit far enough down to differentiate you, and close enough to the top to be worth the effort.

  • 14.7% snowflake of live postings
  • 14.6% infrastructure of live postings
  • 14.6% monitoring of live postings
  • 14.2% continuous improvement of live postings
  • 13.7% optimization of live postings
  • 12.9% etl of live postings
  • 12.8% data engineering of live postings
  • 12.2% data pipeline of live postings
  • 12.1% business requirements of live postings
  • 11.2% quality assurance of live postings

Who is hiring, and where those roles sit

Companies hiring for this role

  • 1 Agoda 56
  • 2 Mastercard 28
  • 3 Wise 27
  • 4 Salesforce 23
  • 5 Shopee 18
  • 6 Stripe 18
  • 7 Esri 16
  • 8 Nvidia 16

Where the roles we index sit

Where our listings sit, not the world's — the corpus skews to US and English-language boards.

Latest openings

Updated daily · closed roles removed within 24h
See these roles ranked just for you Upload your CV once. Every role is scored 0–100 against your experience, in real time as you search. Rank jobs by my fit →
See all 2,513 live postings →

Free. No card required. Every role ranked against your CV.

The tools split by seniority, and it is worth knowing which way

The seniority chart on this page shows something a written list would never surface: the tools most associated with analyst work are not evenly spread across levels. Spreadsheet and dashboard-building skills are asked for noticeably more often in mid-level postings, while SQL, deeper analytics language and mentoring skew toward senior ones. The shift is not that seniors stop using the first set — it is that the postings stop mentioning them, because at that level they are assumed.

Read practically, that gives you two different targets. If you are trying to get the first job, the mid-skewed tools are what the adverts you are answering actually name. If you are trying to move up, the senior-skewed ones are what the next set of adverts will ask for, and the gap between the two lists is a reasonable answer to the question of what to learn next.

On the sample behind these numbers

"Data analyst" is a title used loosely, which is a genuine limitation here. It covers roles from reporting production in an operations team to something close to data science in a product one, and this page covers all of them. That breadth is why the list mixes warehouse querying with spreadsheet work and why the experience spread is wider than it is for more narrowly defined titles.

The country breakdown is a picture of where the roles we index sit rather than of the world — our corpus is drawn from English-language boards and skews toward the United States. Where a country has a visa sponsorship page of its own, its row links through to the live openings there.

Common questions

SQL is close to universal in these postings, followed by general analytics language, a visualisation tool, Python, and spreadsheet work. The full ranked list with the share of postings naming each one is at the top of this page, recalculated daily from live adverts.

Most postings cluster at three to five years, but the entry-level share here is substantially larger than for most technical roles on this site, and the six-plus band is small. Those figures are minimums — the lower bound each advert states — and a meaningful share of postings state nothing at all, which is shown rather than hidden.

It is one of the more accessible technical roles by the measure that matters here, which is how many live postings actually accept two years or less. The experience chart above shows that share directly. It is also a common route onward into data engineering or data science, both of which ask for more experience up front.

Less often than SQL, on this evidence — roughly half of these postings name it against four in five for SQL. It is closer to a differentiator than a requirement, which makes it a reasonable thing to learn second rather than first if you are choosing where to spend time.

Some of these roles are remote and a smaller number are open to candidates in any country rather than remote within one — both figures are in the work-policy chart above. Analyst roles sit closer to the business than engineering ones do, which is part of why the hybrid and on-site shares here are larger than you might expect.

See which of these you actually match

Upload your CV once. Every role here gets scored 0–100 against it, so you apply to the ones where you have a real shot.

Free to start · no card required