Where do your tax dollars actually go?

What is TX Salary Watch?

TX Salary Watch is an independent, public-interest project that publishes Texas state government payroll data in a format ordinary Texans can actually read. The dataset behind this site lists tens of thousands of employees of Texas state agencies, universities, and public boards — the people whose salaries are paid out of state appropriations and tax revenue. We did not collect this data ourselves. It is published in the public interest under Texas open-records law and is mirrored from the Texas Tribune's Government Salaries Explorer.

Most public salary databases bury this information behind clunky search forms or lock it inside spreadsheets that require a download. We wanted something simpler: a fast, browsable, citation-ready website where every agency, every job title, and every employee has a real, durable URL. Linking to a name, a title, or an agency should just work — for journalists, watchdogs, students, and anyone curious about how their tax dollars are spent.

Use the search above to find a person or department by name. Browse by agency if you want a high-level view of who works where, by job title if you want to compare what people in the same role earn across agencies, by city if you want a metro-by-metro view, or by category if you want to drill down into a sector like universities or public safety. Read our methodology page for caveats about what these numbers do and do not represent — annualized pay is a snapshot, not a paycheck, and there are honest reasons two people in the same job title can show very different totals.