City · Texas
Waco — Public Employee Salaries
State agencies, public-university campuses, and statewide programs employing 3 Texans in Waco. Aggregate annual payroll: $706,475. Average base pay: $235,492. Median: $231,000. The largest reported salary in this city is $244,475.
Who works for the State of Texas in Waco
The public-sector workforce attributed to Waco reflects a mix of agency headquarters, university campuses, and field operations. The largest employer in our dataset for this city is TENTH COURT OF APPEALS DISTRICT, followed by other state agencies and authorities listed below. Together they account for 3 of the 6,000 employee records in OpenPayrolls Texas, with an aggregate annualized payroll of $706,475.
Top job titles in Waco 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 Waco span $231,000 at the entry-level reporting threshold to $244,475 at the top, with the median holding at $231,000. 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 Waco, falls in the bands typical of public-sector administrative and direct-care roles.
Top earners in Waco
| Name | Title | Agency | Annual pay |
|---|---|---|---|
| Matthew Johnson | Chief Justice | TENTH COURT OF APPEALS DISTRICT | $244,475 |
| Steven Smith | Justice | TENTH COURT OF APPEALS DISTRICT | $231,000 |
| Artie Harris | Justice | TENTH COURT OF APPEALS DISTRICT | $231,000 |
Major employers in Waco
Reading these numbers in context
Public-sector salary data is most useful when read in context. A state classification in Waco 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 Waco versus other Texas cities. For a deeper editorial primer on how Texas reports compensation, see our methodology and the salary guides.