Most types of higher ed employees received median salary increases that outpaced inflation in 2025-26, with the exception of tenure-track faculty. Over the past decade, their salary increases have lost ground in real dollars.gettyWhile most groups of college and university employees received median increases that outpaced inflation in 2025-26, tenure-track faculty saw raises that lagged inflation by almost one percentage point — marking ten straight years where their salary increases have not kept up with annual inflation.That’s a main takeaway from a new survey conducted by the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources. The overall number of institutions included in the analysis ranged from 469 to 1,011, depending on the employee group in question. Inflation was calculated by measuring year-over-year changes in the Consumer Price Index, as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.The CUPA-HR methodology breaks out salary information for five categories of higher education workers:Administrators, which include senior level-positions such as presidents, provosts, chief positions, deputy positions, deans, and department heads, received a 2.9% median pay increase during the 2025–26 academic year, compared to an inflation rate of 2.7% for the year.Professionals, which include employees with specialized expertise typically requiring a college degree like librarians and IT professionals, received a 2.8% median pay increase this year. That gain was smaller than for each of the prior four years, but it still beat the inflation rate. Staff, a category that includes mainly non-exempt hourly positions not requiring a college degree (e.g., clerical staff, custodians, food service workers), saw the largest percentage increase of any category at 3%, the third year in a row that staff raises have exceeded the rate of inflation.MORE FOR YOUTenure-track faculty, which includes both faculty who have already been awarded tenure as well as those on the tenure track, were given a 1.8% pay raise —the smallest across all of the five employee categories.Non-tenure-track faculty, which refers to full-time teaching faculty who are not on the tenure track but are instead on one-year or renewable contracts, received a 2.0% median salary increase in 2025-26. Faculty Pay Lags Across Past DecadeThis marks the fourth consecutive year that tenure-track faculty have received the lowest salary increase among all the employee categories. “Across the 10 years of data depicted, tenure-track faculty salary increases have never exceeded the rate of inflation. Tenure-track faculty have not received salary increases in real dollars for the past decade,” according to the survey. The situation was not much better for non-tenured faculty. In all but two of the nine years since 2017, their median salary increases were either the smallest or the next to the smallest of any college employee group.Meanwhile, median pay increases for administrators, professionals, and staff exceeded the rate of inflation for the third consecutive year. After adjusting for inflation, all categories of higher ed employees are earning less in real dollars than they did before the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the CUPA-HR data. Tenure-track faculty had the largest gap, with median salaries that were 11.7% lower than in 2019-20 after adjusting for inflation. Non-tenure-track teaching faculty also had a large gap, receiving median salaries that were 6.8% lower than in 2019-20. Non-exempt staff had the smallest salary gap, at .9% less than in 2019-20.Commenting on these results to Inside Higher Education, Jacqueline Bichsel, associate vice president of research at CUPA-HR, said, "for many faculty, the only opportunities they have to see a significant salary increase are when they are promoted. 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.”“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,” Bichsel added.Faculty salaries have lagged inflation over longer periods of time than just the past decade. A recent Chronicle of Higher Education analysis found that, between 2013 and 2023, average pay for college faculty nationwide declined by 1.5% after adjusting for inflation.And now, stagnating wages have given rise to a new round of faculty strikes, including at New York University, Portland Community College and potentially at the University of Illinois, Springfield, with professors demanding pay increases that would help them make up for years of lost ground.