CCNA Salary 2026: Bangalore vs Hyderabad vs Delhi NCR.
A CCNA-certified fresher earns ₹3.8–5.2 LPA in Bangalore, ₹3.5–4.8 LPA in Hyderabad and ₹3.2–4.5 LPA in Delhi NCR. By the 3–5 year mark that spread widens to ₹8.0–11.0, ₹7.5–9.5 and ₹7.0–8.5 respectively. Bangalore pays the most at every level and costs the most to live in. Below: the full breakdown by city and experience, the four things that actually move your number, and the role ladder after CCNA.
| Experience | Range |
|---|---|
| 0–1 year (fresher) NOC Engineer, Network Support Engineer | ₹3.8 – 5.2 LPA |
| 1–3 years Network Engineer, L2 Support | ₹5.5 – 8.0 LPA |
| 3–5 years Senior Network Engineer | ₹8.0 – 11.0 LPA |
| Experience | Range |
|---|---|
| 0–1 year (fresher) NOC Engineer, Network Support Engineer | ₹3.5 – 4.8 LPA |
| 1–3 years Network Engineer, L2 Support | ₹5.0 – 7.5 LPA |
| 3–5 years Senior Network Engineer | ₹7.5 – 9.5 LPA |
| Experience | Range |
|---|---|
| 0–1 year (fresher) NOC Engineer, IT Support with networking | ₹3.2 – 4.5 LPA |
| 1–3 years Network Engineer, ISP/Telecom NOC | ₹5.0 – 7.0 LPA |
| 3–5 years Senior Network Engineer | ₹7.0 – 8.5 LPA |
How to read these numbers: ranges are market reference data compiled from public job-board postings for CCNA-tagged roles in each city, expressed as annual CTC. They are not Networkers Home graduate outcomes and are not a promise of any particular salary. Individual offers vary with interview performance, degree background, employer type and negotiation.
Why does Bangalore pay more?
Density of employers, mostly. Bangalore has the largest concentration of product companies and global capability centres in India, and those two employer types pay above services firms for the same years of experience. When several of them are hiring network engineers in the same quarter, candidates have leverage they simply do not have in a market with fewer buyers.
The second reason is what the roles are. A larger share of Bangalore's networking work sits next to cloud infrastructure and automation rather than pure break-fix support, and those roles are budgeted differently. An engineer running hybrid connectivity between an on-premise data centre and a cloud VPC is not competing for the same salary band as one resetting switch ports.
The honest counterweight: rent and commute. The ₹1–2.5 LPA advantage Bangalore holds at the senior level does not survive contact with Bangalore rent as cleanly as the headline suggests. Engineers who optimise for savings rather than CTC frequently do better in Hyderabad. Engineers who optimise for what they will be worth in year eight generally do better in Bangalore, because the roles they need to have held by then are concentrated there.
Hyderabad — the cost-adjusted case
Hyderabad pays roughly 8–13% below Bangalore at every experience level on this page. That looks like a straightforward loss until you put living costs next to it, at which point a fresher on ₹4.2 LPA in Hyderabad is often banking more each month than one on ₹4.6 LPA in Bangalore.
The hiring base is solid — large global employers with substantial Hyderabad infrastructure, plus managed service providers running networks for overseas clients. That MSP concentration matters more than it sounds: MSP work exposes you to many customer topologies in a short time, which is genuinely good early-career training even when the on-call rota is unpleasant.
Where Hyderabad is weaker is the top of the ladder. There are fewer roles above the senior network engineer band than in Bangalore, so engineers who want an architecture track often end up relocating around year six or seven anyway. Worth knowing at the start rather than discovering it later.
Delhi NCR — widest variety, flattest curve
Delhi NCR has the lowest entry band of the three at ₹3.2–4.5 LPA and the flattest progression, topping out around ₹8.5 LPA at the 3–5 year mark where Bangalore reaches ₹11.0. It also has the widest range of things a network engineer can actually work on — enterprise IT, telecom, ISP operations, and government-linked infrastructure all hire here in volume.
That telecom and ISP weighting is a genuine double edge. Service provider networking gives you scale and protocol depth that most enterprise engineers never touch — BGP at a size where it behaves differently, MPLS in production, carrier-grade failure modes. It also tends to pay less than enterprise or product work at the same level, and the skills are less portable into cloud roles later.
Within NCR the spread is real: Gurgaon multinationals generally pay above the band shown here, closer to Hyderabad levels, while Noida skews toward services and ISP roles at the lower end. Treating "Delhi NCR" as one market will mislead you when you are comparing two specific offers.
What actually moves your number
City sets the band. These four decide where inside it you land — and in practice they matter more than the city does, because you control all four.
This is the single biggest separator at fresher level, and it is visible within about four minutes of a technical interview. A candidate who has configured OSPF on a real router and watched adjacency fail knows what EXSTART means. A candidate who has only read about it does not. Employers in all three cities pay a premium for the first kind, and the gap is roughly ₹1–1.5 LPA at entry.
CCNA on its own is an entry ticket. The engineers who cross ₹10 LPA before year four almost always added something specific to it — CCNP Enterprise for routing depth, PCNSE or Fortinet NSE for firewall work, or AWS networking for cloud roles. Adding it in year one or two compounds. Adding it in year five mostly just catches you up.
Product companies and global capability centres pay more per year of experience. Service companies pay less but hand you a much broader surface area early — more clients, more topologies, more failure modes. Neither is the right answer for everyone. If you want the higher number at year two, target GCCs. If you want the higher number at year six, the broad early exposure often wins.
Not full software engineering — enough Python to parse a config, hit a REST API, and stop doing the same change on forty devices by hand. This is still uncommon among CCNA-level engineers in India, which is exactly why it is worth money. It also happens to be what 200-301's automation domain is gesturing at.
The role ladder after CCNA
Monitoring, ticket triage, L1 escalation. This is where most CCNA careers start, in every one of the three cities.
Owning configuration changes, VLAN and routing work, on-call. The first role where the pay curve steepens noticeably.
Design input, escalation ownership, mentoring L1/L2. Usually gated on CCNP or equivalent demonstrated depth.
The most common lateral move that raises the ceiling. Firewall vendors — Palo Alto, Fortinet, Check Point — pay better than pure routing at the same experience level.
AWS/Azure networking on top of a CCNA foundation. Smallest talent pool of the five, and it shows in the offers.
Where CCNA training fits
CCNA training at Networkers Home is 40 hours of live instruction — 2 hours a day, one month of classes — inside a 45-day programme window, with 60 hours of real Cisco lab access through your student portal login. The fee is ₹9,912 incl. GST. The Cisco 200-301 exam voucher is paid separately to Pearson VUE.
The lab hours are the part that maps onto the first item in the list above. Sixty hours is roughly 1.5× the live-instruction time, which is the ratio that tends to produce engineers who can configure OSPF under interview pressure rather than describe it. Training runs one-on-one or in a batch, and students choose their instruction language through ollasync.com, the multilanguage video platform Networkers Home builds and operates.
CCNA salary — frequently asked
Which city pays the most for CCNA in 2026?
Bangalore, at every experience level. A CCNA-certified fresher in Bangalore sees roughly ₹3.8–5.2 LPA versus ₹3.5–4.8 in Hyderabad and ₹3.2–4.5 in Delhi NCR. The gap widens with experience — by the 3–5 year mark Bangalore ranges ₹8.0–11.0 LPA against Delhi NCR's ₹7.0–8.5. Bangalore also has the highest cost of living of the three, so the take-home difference is smaller than the CTC difference suggests.
What is a realistic CCNA fresher salary in India in 2026?
₹3.2–5.2 LPA depending on city, with Bangalore at the top of that band and Delhi NCR at the bottom. Anyone quoting a single national number is averaging across three quite different job markets. Freshers who can demonstrate hands-on configuration and troubleshooting on real equipment tend to land in the upper half of their city's band; those with certification but no lab time tend to land in the lower half.
Is Hyderabad better than Bangalore for a CCNA career?
It depends what you are optimising for. Hyderabad pays roughly 8–13% less at every level, but rent and commute costs are meaningfully lower, so net savings often come out ahead. Bangalore has more roles, more product companies, and a faster progression curve — which matters more over a ten-year horizon than a two-year one. For a first job with savings as the priority, Hyderabad is defensible. For maximum ceiling, Bangalore.
Does CCNA alone guarantee a good salary?
No, and it is worth being direct about that. CCNA gets your CV past the initial filter for entry-level networking roles — that is genuinely valuable, because without it many postings will not look at you. But it is a screening credential, not a differentiator, because a large number of applicants hold it. What separates offers at the same certification level is demonstrated hands-on ability and, within two to three years, a second certification.
How much does CCNA salary increase after CCNP?
Adding CCNP Enterprise typically moves an engineer from the L2 band into the L3/senior band, which in Bangalore is roughly the difference between ₹5.5–8.0 LPA and ₹8.0–11.0 LPA. The increase is not automatic on certification day — it comes when you change role or renegotiate, and it is larger if you add CCNP in years one to three rather than later.
Which pays more after CCNA — network security or cloud networking?
Cloud networking has the smaller talent pool and currently the higher ceiling, but network security has more open roles and a shorter path in from a CCNA base. A firewall certification such as PCNSE or Fortinet NSE is a 4-8 week addition on top of CCNA; a credible cloud networking profile usually takes longer. Security is the more reliable next step; cloud is the higher-variance one.
Do Gurgaon and Noida pay differently within Delhi NCR?
Yes. Gurgaon-based multinationals generally pay above the Delhi NCR range shown here, closer to Hyderabad levels, while Noida skews toward IT services and ISP roles at the lower end of the band. Delhi NCR also carries a higher proportion of telecom and ISP work than Bangalore or Hyderabad, which gives excellent depth in service-provider networking but a flatter senior salary curve.
Are these CCNA salary figures Networkers Home placement outcomes?
No. Every range on this page is market reference data compiled from public job-board postings for CCNA-tagged roles in each city. They are not Networkers Home graduate outcomes and should not be read as a promise of any particular salary. Individual offers vary widely with interview performance, degree background, employer type and negotiation.
How long does CCNA training take before I can apply for these roles?
CCNA training at Networkers Home is 40 hours of live instruction — 2 hours a day, one month of classes — inside a 45-day programme window, with 60 hours of real Cisco lab access through your student portal login. The fee is ₹9,912 incl. GST. Most students book the Cisco 200-301 exam within the buffer period at the end of that window.
Should I relocate for a higher CCNA salary?
For a first job, usually not for the salary alone — the ₹500–700 per month difference between city bands at fresher level is easily erased by rent and relocation costs. Relocation makes more financial sense at the 3–5 year mark, when the absolute gap between cities is ₹1–2.5 LPA and you have the experience to negotiate. The stronger reason to move to Bangalore early is role density, not pay.
Continue reading
- CCNA certification cost in India — exam fee, coaching, and what the range actually buys
- What is CCNA — syllabus, exam format and who it suits
- CCNA full form — and all nine legacy Cisco track names
- CCNA vs CCNP vs CCIE — which to take first
- Network engineer salary in Bangalore — the wider role, beyond CCNA
- CCNP Enterprise training — the most common next step