ASA’s Annual NEA Higher Education Faculty Salary Analysis Released
I
n this 2025 NEA Special Salary issue, we take a post-pandemic look at faculty salaries in 2024. What we find, looking at federal data, is that faculty salaries rose by an average of 4.3 percent between 2022-23 and 2023-24, exceeding the 3.3 percent inflation rate. As a result, faculty purchasing power increased by 1 percent. Despite this improvement, purchasing power in 2023-24 was 6.8 percent below pre-pandemic levels.
Below are additional findings:
>> Rank and institutional type make a difference. Faculty in community colleges earned about $81,344, on average, compared to $107,034 earned by professors at public, Ph.D.-granting research universities, on average.
>> Where you teach also makes a difference. The highest paid faculty are in states with powerful unions: California, New Jersey, Delaware, Hawaii, and Connecticut. The lowest paid faculty are not: Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana.
>> The gender gap persists. On average, women faculty in public institutions earned 86 cents to the dollar paid a man. The gender gap is smallest at community colleges; biggest at research universities where men are more likely to be promoted to full professor and women are more likely to work in departments that aren’t as valued, like education or library science.
>> HBCU faculty remain undervalued. On average, in 2024, HBCU faculty earned 75 cents on the dollar paid to other faculty. The disparity is most pronounced in research universities, where HBCU faculty earned $29,000 less than their non-HBCU counterparts.
>> Unions make a difference. Community college faculty, for example, were paid $93,000, on average, at institutions with collectively bargained contracts. Meanwhile, their colleagues in the same states—but who don’t have union contracts—were paid $73,000, while community college faculty in states without collective bargaining were paid $66,000.
See NEA’s infographics and highlights
NEA News: Eight Charts that Tell You Everything About Faculty Pay
