City · Texas
Austin — Public Employee Salaries
State agencies, public-university campuses, and statewide programs employing 4,878 Texans in Austin. Aggregate annual payroll: $599,541,027. Average base pay: $122,907. Median: $80,021. The largest reported salary in this city is $850,005.
Who works for the State of Texas in Austin
The public-sector workforce attributed to Austin reflects a mix of agency headquarters, university campuses, and field operations. The largest employer in our dataset for this city is HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES COMMISSION, followed by other state agencies and authorities listed below. Together they account for 4,878 of the 6,000 employee records in OpenPayrolls Texas, with an aggregate annualized payroll of $599,541,027.
Top job titles in Austin include District Judge, Active, Eligibility Advisor Ii, Deputy Director Ii, Direct Support Prof Ii, Direct Support Prof Iii, Criminal District Attorney, Director Vii, Psychiatrist Iii. These are the most frequently appearing titles among reported employees, not necessarily the highest paid — for the highest-paid roles, see the table below.
Salary ranges in Austin span $5,520 at the entry-level reporting threshold to $850,005 at the top, with the median holding at $80,021. As elsewhere in Texas state government, the highest individual salaries are concentrated in academic medical-center leadership, university executive roles, athletic-program coaching, and senior judicial positions. Mid-range salaries tend to cluster around professional and technical classifications — engineers, accountants, attorneys, IT staff, and senior caseworkers. Entry-level state pay, where it appears in Austin, falls in the bands typical of public-sector administrative and direct-care roles.
Top earners in Austin
Major employers in Austin
- HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES COMMISSION
- TEXAS DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION
- DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC SAFETY
- DEPARTMENT OF FAMILY AND PROTECTIVE SERVICES
- COMPTROLLER'S - JUDICIARY
- TEACHER RETIREMENT SYSTEM
- OFFICE OF THE ATTORNEY GENERAL
- TEXAS WORKFORCE COMMISSION
- DEPARTMENT OF STATE HEALTH SERVICES
- PARKS AND WILDLIFE DEPARTMENT
Reading these numbers in context
Public-sector salary data is most useful when read in context. A state classification in Austin may differ in cost-of-living impact from the same classification in another metro — Texas does not publish formal locality pay schedules across its general state workforce, so headline figures are not adjusted for housing, childcare, or commuting costs. For comparable benchmarking, see our city-by-city breakdown on all Texas cities or the agency-by-agency comparison on the agencies index.
If you are researching a specific public role — for hiring, journalism, or policy work — the job-titles index aggregates every classification across the state so you can compare what the same title pays in Austin versus other Texas cities. For a deeper editorial primer on how Texas reports compensation, see our methodology and the salary guides.
Pay by job title in Austin
Drill into specific classifications to see local salary distributions, top earners, and the agencies hiring for each role in Austin.
- District Judge, Active in Austin · 237 employees
- Eligibility Advisor Ii in Austin · 109 employees
- Deputy Director Ii in Austin · 82 employees
- Direct Support Prof Ii in Austin · 81 employees
- Direct Support Prof Iii in Austin · 70 employees
- Criminal District Attorney in Austin · 63 employees
- Director Vii in Austin · 62 employees
- Psychiatrist Iii in Austin · 61 employees