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Fact check: What is the average salary for ICE agents after 5 years of service in 2025?
Executive Summary
The available 2025 materials do not provide a clear, authoritative figure for the average salary of an ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agent specifically after five years of service; published datasets and press material instead report role-level averages, starting pay ranges, and incentive programs. The closest concrete numbers are role averages reported in May–November 2025—Special Agent $110,853, Systems Engineer $139,099, Information Technology Specialist $99,910, and an ICE-wide average of $74,836—but none of these sources specify a five-year tenure point [1] [2] [3] [4].
1. Claim harvesting: What people are asserting and where the lead comes from
The assembled documents make three primary claims: role-level average salaries for ICE positions, published starting and top-of-scale base salaries, and agency statements about recruiting incentives. Salary.com entries assert a Special Agent average of $110,853 and an Immigration Officer average of $102,519 [1] [5]. Another Salary.com listing gives ICE’s overall employee average at $74,836 [4]. A separate media or agency discussion notes base pay ranges from $49,739 to $89,528 before locality/overtime and highlights recent pay increases tied to recruitment efforts [6]. None of these explicitly state averages for five-year tenure.
2. Pinpointing the explicit numbers: what the sources actually report
Salary.com pages from May and November 2025 provide specific annual averages by job title—for example, Special Agent at $110,853 and Systems Engineer at $139,099—and an ICE-wide mean of $74,836 [1] [2] [4]. A July 2025 report describes DHS/ICE pay increases and recruitment goals and lists a base pay band starting at $49,739 and topping out at $89,528 prior to overtime and locality adjustments [6]. A September 2025 ICE press release emphasizes recruiting incentives such as signing bonuses up to $50,000 and student loan repayment, but does not attach these to a five-year salary estimate [7].
3. Where the data fails to answer the five-year question directly
None of the assembled analyses provide a clear calculation or dataset that isolates the average salary for ICE agents specifically after five years of service. The Salary.com role averages report observed salaries across incumbents at unspecified tenure distributions, and the DHS/ICE recruitment narrative gives base pay ranges and incentives without tenure brackets [1] [6] [4]. This means there is no source in the provided set that directly ties pay to a five-year mark, leaving a crucial data gap for the original question.
4. Reconciling role averages with base pay and locality adjustments
The apparent discrepancy between role average figures (e.g., Special Agent $110,853) and the reported base ranges (e.g., $49,739–$89,528 before locality/overtime) is explainable by supplemental pay components: overtime, locality pay, law-enforcement pay differentials, and higher-grade positions within job titles can push observed averages above base minimums [1] [6]. Salary.com aggregates observed pay data, which often reflects employees at multiple steps and with overtime, whereas the DHS reporting describes nominal base bands. Therefore, observed averages are not directly comparable to base step amounts without breakdowns.
5. Recruitment incentives that complicate mid-career averages
ICE’s recruitment statements in September 2025 highlight large one-time incentives—signing bonuses up to $50,000 and loan repayment options—which raise total compensation for new hires and may distort cross-sectional averages if included in aggregated datasets [7]. The July 2025 recruitment coverage also references sharp pay increases as part of an effort to add agents, which shifts pay distributions over time [6]. These temporal and one-off components mean that average pay reported in 2025 may reflect a mix of legacy employees, newly hired incentivized recruits, and overtime-heavy law enforcement roles, complicating tenure-based inferences.
6. Cross-source consistency and contradictions worth noting
Across the provided items there is consistency that role-level averages exist and that ICE has increased compensation and incentives in 2025, but there is contradiction in what a “typical” ICE agent earns because Price-of-Work adjustments and job heterogeneity vary widely [1] [6] [4]. Salary.com figures show higher averages for some law-enforcement and technical roles, while the DHS coverage emphasizes base bands lower than some observed averages, indicating different metrics and inclusion criteria are being used by each source.
7. Practical conclusion and next steps to get the five-year number
Based on the assembled sources, you cannot reliably state an average ICE agent salary after five years from the provided materials; the best pathway is to request or obtain either (a) ICE or DHS personnel pay tables with step/grade progression reflecting five years of tenure, or (b) microdata from a compensation aggregator that allows filtering by tenure = 5 years and job title. In the interim, the most defensible working range for 2025 observed compensation lies between the ICE-wide mean $74,836 and role averages like Special Agent $110,853, acknowledging that overtime, locality, and bonuses materially alter any five-year estimate [4] [1] [7].