An independent index of Texas public payrolls
OpenPayrolls Texas exists to make a single, simple promise: every Texas public employee record should have a stable, fast, browsable URL that anyone can link to, cite, and read without a login or a paywall.
Why we built this
Texas was one of the first states to publish detailed payroll data for its state workforce. The data has been online, in some form, for nearly two decades — first as raw spreadsheets, then through searchable web tools maintained by the Comptroller, the Tribune, and various transparency nonprofits. But nearly every existing salary explorer suffers from the same set of problems: dynamic, JavaScript-rendered pages that don't link cleanly; tools designed for one-off lookups instead of repeated reference; and very little aggregation across roles or sectors. Reporters, watchdog groups, university researchers, and ordinary curious citizens all keep hitting the same wall: the data exists, but it isn't useful.
We built OpenPayrolls to fix that, with three editorial decisions that shape every page on this site:
- Real URLs. Every employee, every agency, every job title gets a permanent path. You can email
/agency/teas-department-of-transportationto a colleague and trust it will resolve to the same page tomorrow. - Aggregation by default. A salary record is more meaningful in context. Every employee page links to the average and range for their job title and their agency. Every agency page surfaces its top earners and its most common roles. Every job-title page compares pay across agencies.
- Plain language. No jargon, no charts that take twenty seconds to render, no "click to expand." If we can't explain a number in a sentence, we don't publish the number.
Where the data comes from
The salary records on this site are derived from Texas Tribune Government Salaries Explorer, which publishes the State of Texas payroll snapshot in machine-readable form. The Tribune obtains the underlying data directly from the Comptroller of Public Accounts under the Texas Public Information Act and republishes it in the public interest. We do not collect this data ourselves and we do not modify it: we mirror it, reshape it for browsing, and cache it on disk for fast page rendering.
Each release is a snapshot of who was on the state payroll on a particular date. It is not a record of every dollar paid out during the year. People who started or left mid-period, who switched agencies, or who held multiple positions show up exactly once in the cleaned dataset, with the role and pay associated with their primary position at the snapshot date. See our methodology page for the full set of rules and caveats.
Who this is for
OpenPayrolls is built for everyone who cares about how Texas spends its workforce dollars: investigative reporters tracking pay across agencies; researchers comparing higher-education compensation against the rest of state government; school-district administrators benchmarking their own salary plans; voters trying to understand what an elected official's office actually costs to run. The site is intentionally free, requires no account, and contains no tracking beyond what's needed to keep the lights on.
What we won't do
We will not accept paid suppressions of names, titles, or salaries. The whole point of public payroll data is that it stays public. We will, however, work cooperatively with the original data publisher when there is a clear safety reason to suppress a specific record — for instance, employees whose roles already qualify for confidentiality under Texas Government Code Chapter 552. Those records are filtered out of our dataset before it ever reaches a page.
Contact
Have a correction, a question about the data, or a story idea? Visit our contact page. We are a small project; please be patient and please be specific. Pointers to a particular record (URL or record ID) are far more useful than general feedback.
OpenPayrolls Texas is an independent transparency project and is not affiliated with the State of Texas, the Texas Tribune, or any government agency. The site name and presentation are original to this project; the underlying salary data is public-record information published by the State of Texas.