An organization that promotes national or international amateur sports competition (so long as it doesn’t provide athletic facilities or equipment) or works to prevent cruelty to children or animals is defined as one that serves any of the following purposes: religious, educational, charitable, scientific, literary, testing for public safety, or any combination of these.
The Texas Tribune is pleased to introduce our Government Salaries Explorer in a new and improved format. Four times a year, the new Explorer will receive updates. We offer comprehensive information on every position held by each of the 113 state government agencies.
We polled more than 1,000 readers about how we could improve the data’s usefulness to them as part of the design of this new website. The Tribune is a news institution with scores of journalists who regularly follow the operations of the state government and hold authorities accountable. Still, many website visitors were unaware of this, as we discovered. The new website makes those journalists more reachable; on each page, you’ll find our reporters’ contact information and their most recent news.
Our design has been updated to be clearer and easier to use, with crucial context like salary ranges for particular positions. We have incorporated more interactive charts and tables to facilitate comparisons across tenure, ethnicity, and gender.
Table of Contents
Duration of working period
Most staff members have been with the School for the Deaf for between one and ten years.
Employees by Gender
The majority of the workers in this position identify as female.
Company status
The majority of those who work in this capacity do so part-time. Depending on the number of hours worked in a week, an employee’s employment status determines whether they are labeled as working full- or part-time.
Active employees
There were 160 people in this position as of July 1, 2022, and seven were paid less than the average state employee. Their data is concealed out of respect for their privacy.
Salaries for the Texas Tribune
Salaries for staff of public hospitals, universities, and local governments are no longer included in the Explorer. We are better equipped provide detailed data that our data is accurate and current by concentrating our wages explorer on a single data source—the state comptroller’s database of state government employees. The Parks and Wildlife Department’s average pay is $52,175. We’ll compare that to other state government departments to see how they stack up.
Read: THE PROS AND CONS OF TEXAS LAW SHIELD AND 4 IMPORTANT CATEGORIES OF WEAPONS
Another significant adjustment we made was to stop publishing the wages of those who make less than the median annual pay, which is $44,642. People with higher incomes are likelier to be news makers; those with lower incomes are not well-known. However, in the data analysis for each agency and position, lower-paid employees are still considered. All elected officials, including those who earn less than the median, will always have their sites on our website.
Highest-paid state employees in Texas
According to information from The Texas Tribune, approximately 137,000 people employed by the state government of Texas make a median salary of $45,590. The highest-paid public servant earns more than $600,000.
Most top-paid public servants are employed by the Teacher Retirement System of Texas, the biggest retirement system in the state that provides benefits to almost 1.8 million people. Top state officials do not earn nearly as much as the highest-paid worker by job title . For instance, Governor Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton earn a yearly salary of $153,750.
Michelle Le Beau Salary
Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas Chief Scientific $608,850
Jase Auby
Teacher Retirement System Chief Investment Officer
Payment: $550,000
Senior Managing Director
Teacher Retirement System, Eric Lang
Earnings: $414,999
Kimberly Carey,
Teacher Retirement System Investment Director; salary: $408,000
Brain Guthrie
Executive Director of the Teacher Retirement System,
Earnings: $399,999
Texas teachers make a standard wage. However, they receive some of the lowest pensions in the nation.
According to the National Education Association
According to the National Education Association, Texas’ teacher compensation in 2016 came in at number 27, according to the raw data. Texas teachers made $51,890 on average, about $6,500 less than the national average.
Teachers, however, have long maintained that low funding for public schools reduces their pay. According to the Legislative Budget Board, the state paid for around 48.5% of the cost of public education for the 2008 fiscal year. That percentage will be closer to 38 percent by the 2019 fiscal year. During the same period, teacher incomes stayed relatively flat [Texas teachers made, on average, $47,000 in 2008].
“Teachers and other staff members at a school system represent one of the highest costs to education. According to Clay Robison, a Texas State Teachers Association spokesman, that is the state’s largest expense. “Teachers are shortchanged when education budgets are slashed in Texas. Regarding teacher salaries, we already lag behind the national average and are closing the gap.
According to Ed Allen of the American Federation of Teachers, salary isn’t the only factor to consider when comparing Texas teachers to their counterparts in other states.
“Most individuals consider salaries when making a national comparison. However, according to Allen, when teachers age, the amount put into their retirement and their health insurance becomes quite important.
Since these programs’ structures differ across the country, according to Joel Solomon, a senior policy analyst with the National Education Association, it is challenging to compare Texas’ teacher health insurance systems to those of other states. However, he noted that “what we find in Texas is very concerning when we look at educators’ health benefits across the country and how essential… maintaining quality health benefits to educators are.”
Most states contribute to Social Security and a pension plan to support retirement. For most of its teachers, Texas is one of the few states that solely contributes to a pension fund and does not contribute to Social Security; therefore, when they retire, most Texas teachers won’t be eligible for its benefits. Less than 50 districts in the state take part in Social Security on their own.
Texas is well behind other states that provide a teacher-specific pension plan for paying its pension schemes.
For many years, Texas never met the constitutionally required minimum contribution to the Teacher Retirement System. According to the National Association of State Retirement Administrators, it now pays 6.8%. Additionally, according to the Texas Constitution, the state cannot contribute more than 10% to pension funds without a voter-approved constitutional change.
The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, unbiased news outlet supported partly by contributions from its members, foundations, and corporate sponsors, has received financial support from the Texas State Teachers, the Association of Texas Professional Educators, and the Texas Classroom Teachers Association. No financial backers have any influence over the journalism of the Tribune. Here is a comprehensive list of them.
Texas was in the middle of the pack when it came to teacher pay, coming in at number 27 in the nation. Texas, however, contributes slightly more than the required amount to the Teacher Retirement System, ranking last in the country for paying teacher retirement.