Admin Raises Outpace Inflation While Faculty Salaries Lag

For the third year in a row, higher education administrators, professionals and staff received pay increases that outpaced inflation, according to a new analysis from the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources. Meanwhile, tenure-track faculty haven’t seen a real-dollar salary increase in over a decade.

Staff, which includes nonexempt employees like clerical staff, custodians and food service workers, received a median 3 percent pay increase during the 2025–26 academic year—the largest increase of any employee category, the analysis shows. It’s the third year in a row that staff received a median salary increase of 3 percent or more.

Administrators, which CUPA-HR defines as senior-level positions like presidents, provosts, deans and department heads, received a 2.9 percent median pay increase during the 2025–26 academic year—a lower median raise than the four previous years, but it still outpaced annual inflation. During the calendar year ending in November 2025, which aligned with the survey collection timeline, inflation was 2.7 percent. A third employee group called professionals—which includes employees in roles that require a college degree, like librarians and IT specialists—received a 2.8 percent median pay increase this academic year, also marking their lowest median pay increase in four years but still higher than the rate of inflation.

Faculty raises, on the other hand, have lagged behind inflation for years. During the 2025–26 academic year, tenure-track faculty received a median 1.8 percent pay increase—the lowest raise of all five employee categories, the analysis shows. This year, tenure-track salaries are a median 11.7 percent lower than they were prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Tenure-track faculty have not received a pay increase that outpaces inflation in any of the 10 years included in the CUPA-HR analysis.

“For many faculty, the only opportunities they have to see a significant salary increase are when they are promoted,” Jacqueline Bichsel, associate vice president of research at CUPA-HR, said in an email. “For tenure-track faculty, this typically occurs twice in a career—when they are promoted from assistant to associate professor and again when (and if) they are promoted to full professor. I am now hearing anecdotal cases where even these promotional events result in salary increases that are less than expected.”

Non-tenure-track faculty received a slightly larger median raise—2 percent—but it, too, did not exceed the rate of inflation this year. Non-tenure-track faculty earn a median 6.8 percent less than they did prior to the pandemic.

Without addressing the lagging faculty pay, higher education leaders are signaling they’re “prepared to have a workforce whose output and work ethic are in alignment with how much they feel valued,” Bichsel said. “And providing essentially no salary increase year after year is a great way of showing an employee that their work is not valuable enough to merit it.”

Across all groups, after adjusting for inflation, higher ed employees are still earning less than they did before the COVID-19 pandemic, the analysis shows.

The analysis is part of CUPA-HR’s annual workforce data update. The association analyzed data from institutions that reported salaries for both the 2024–25 and 2025–26 academic years, which, depending on employee group, ranged from 469 to 1,011 institutions.