City · Texas
Houston — Public Employee Salaries
State agencies, public-university campuses, and statewide programs employing 10 Texans in Houston. Aggregate annual payroll: $2,221,450. Average base pay: $222,145. Median: $221,375. The largest reported salary in this city is $244,475.
Who works for the State of Texas in Houston
The public-sector workforce attributed to Houston reflects a mix of agency headquarters, university campuses, and field operations. The largest employer in our dataset for this city is FOURTEENTH COURT OF APPEALS DISTRICT, followed by other state agencies and authorities listed below. Together they account for 10 of the 6,000 employee records in OpenPayrolls Texas, with an aggregate annualized payroll of $2,221,450.
Top job titles in Houston include Justice, Chief Justice. 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 Houston span $205,975 at the entry-level reporting threshold to $244,475 at the top, with the median holding at $221,375. 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 Houston, falls in the bands typical of public-sector administrative and direct-care roles.
Top earners in Houston
| Name | Title | Agency | Annual pay |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tracy Christopher | Chief Justice | FOURTEENTH COURT OF APPEALS DISTRICT | $244,475 |
| Kevin Jewell | Justice | FOURTEENTH COURT OF APPEALS DISTRICT | $231,000 |
| Kenneth Wise | Justice | FOURTEENTH COURT OF APPEALS DISTRICT | $231,000 |
| Randall Wilson | Justice | FOURTEENTH COURT OF APPEALS DISTRICT | $231,000 |
| Kristin Guiney Mcclees | Justice | FIRST COURT OF APPEALS DISTRICT | $231,000 |
| Claudia Rivas | Justice | FIRST COURT OF APPEALS DISTRICT | $211,750 |
| Bradley Hart | Justice | FOURTEENTH COURT OF APPEALS DISTRICT | $211,750 |
| Amparo Guerra | Justice | FIRST COURT OF APPEALS DISTRICT | $211,750 |
| Chad Bridges | Justice | FOURTEENTH COURT OF APPEALS DISTRICT | $211,750 |
| Noel Adams | Chief Justice | FIRST COURT OF APPEALS DISTRICT | $205,975 |
Major employers in Houston
Reading these numbers in context
Public-sector salary data is most useful when read in context. A state classification in Houston 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 Houston 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 Houston
Drill into specific classifications to see local salary distributions, top earners, and the agencies hiring for each role in Houston.
- Justice in Houston · 8 employees