Cities
Texas Public Salaries by City
Texas state agencies and the public-university systems are spread across 15 Texas cities. Austin sits at the administrative center, but the A&M, UT, Texas Tech, and Houston systems anchor major payroll footprints in college towns and metros from El Paso to Galveston. This index aggregates 6,000 employee records and roughly $677,423,247 in annualized base pay so you can compare workforces by metro at a glance.
All Texas cities
| City | Employees | Average pay | Top employer |
|---|---|---|---|
| Austin | 4,878 | $122,907 | HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES COMMISSION |
| Huntsville | 1,063 | $61,733 | TEXAS DEPARTMENT OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE |
| Houston | 10 | $222,145 | FOURTEENTH COURT OF APPEALS DISTRICT |
| Dallas | 9 | $218,322 | FIFTH COURT OF APPEALS DISTRICT |
| Fort Worth | 8 | $217,573 | SECOND COURT OF APPEALS DISTRICT |
| San Antonio | 5 | $225,995 | FOURTH COURT OF APPEALS DISTRICT |
| Tyler | 4 | $192,369 | TWELFTH COURT OF APPEALS DISTRICT |
| Waco | 3 | $235,492 | TENTH COURT OF APPEALS DISTRICT |
| Temple | 3 | $89,620 | SOIL AND WATER CONSERVATION BOARD |
| Corpus Christi | 3 | $222,658 | THIRTEENTH COURT OF APPEALS DISTRICT |
| Beaumont | 3 | $205,165 | NINTH COURT OF APPEALS DISTRICT |
| Amarillo | 3 | $222,658 | SEVENTH COURT OF APPEALS DISTRICT |
| El Paso | 3 | $176,512 | EIGHTH COURT OF APPEALS DISTRICT |
| Eastland | 3 | $229,075 | ELEVENTH COURT OF APPEALS DISTRICT |
| Texarkana | 2 | $145,113 | SIXTH COURT OF APPEALS DISTRICT |
How Texas spreads its public workforce
Texas concentrates most statewide policy work in Austin, where roughly four out of five state agencies maintain their primary administrative offices. The Capitol Complex alone houses the Legislature, the Governor’s Office, the Comptroller, the Office of the Attorney General, and dozens of regulatory boards. Beyond the capital, the state’s payroll footprint shifts toward the campuses of the public-university systems and the Department of Criminal Justice in Huntsville.
The University of Texas System anchors workforces from El Paso to Edinburg, while the Texas A&M System employs faculty, researchers, and AgriLife extension agents in College Station, Galveston, Corpus Christi, and Kingsville. Texas Tech’s combined academic and health-sciences payroll places Lubbock among the top employment centers on the South Plains. The fourteen geographic Courts of Appeals districts add judicial payroll lines in cities such as Fort Worth, Dallas, Houston, and Amarillo — smaller line items, but meaningful for understanding how Texas distributes its judiciary.
Comparing cities is useful when reading any one salary in context. A research professor in Houston commands different market rates than a comparable role in a smaller campus town; a TxDOT district engineer’s pay reflects regional cost-of-living adjustments that the headline state schedule does not. The per-city pages below break out the largest agencies in each metro, the most common job titles, and the salary distribution so you can answer questions like “what does the average state employee in Lubbock make?” without re-running the data yourself.
Methodology: each employee record is attributed to the primary administrative city of their employing agency. State agencies that maintain field offices statewide are attributed to the Austin headquarters. University and health-sciences employees are attributed to the home campus city. Read the full methodology for the agency-to-city map and known caveats.