The Texas position classification plan, briefly

If you spend any time on this site, you will quickly notice that thousands of Texas state employees share a small number of identical "classification titles." That is by design. Here is the system that produces those titles.

One state, one job market

The State of Texas operates a unified position classification plan that covers most agencies in state government (universities, certain regulatory boards, and the elected statewide officials' offices are partial or full exceptions). The plan groups thousands of distinct positions into a few hundred classifications, each with a numeric class code, a class title, and a salary group.

The point of the plan is fairness across agencies. An "Accountant III" at the Department of Public Safety and an "Accountant III" at the Texas Education Agency should require comparable qualifications, perform comparable work, and fall in the same salary band. Without a unified plan, agencies would compete on title inflation and pay would drift unpredictably across state government.

Salary groups

Each classification belongs to a salary group, denoted by a letter and a number (B11, A17, etc.). Each salary group has a defined minimum, midpoint, and maximum annual rate. Agencies pay individual employees somewhere within that range; they cannot, in general, pay above the maximum without an exception. The Comptroller publishes the current ranges on its website each biennium.

The salary group is not visible in our dataset, but you can infer it from the average and range we show on each job-title page. A title where the lowest paid earns $40,000 and the highest paid earns $52,000 is almost certainly a single-group title; a title with a much wider range probably spans multiple groups because of seniority brackets (e.g. "Accountant I" through "Accountant IV" rolled into a category).

Career ladders

Most professional classifications have a career ladder — a series of related titles (typically I through V or I through VII) that an employee progresses through with experience and performance. A new graduate in accounting starts as Accountant I; a senior practitioner with twenty years of experience reaches Accountant V or higher. The ladder is the primary mechanism by which an individual's pay grows over a long state career, since within-band increases are rare and small.

Exempt and unclassified roles

Senior leadership positions in most agencies are unclassified — they sit outside the standard plan and pay is set by the agency head subject to legislative oversight. Statewide elected officials' offices use unclassified roles extensively. Universities use them almost exclusively for faculty and senior administration. When you see a job title that doesn't sound like an obvious career-ladder rung — "Director", "Chief of Staff", "Executive Vice Chancellor" — it is almost certainly unclassified.

Why this matters for reading the data

The classification plan is what makes job-title pages on this site useful. When we say the average pay for "Programmer V" is X dollars, we are summing across genuinely comparable jobs: same minimum qualifications, same expected scope, same salary group. When we say the average pay for "Director" is Y, we are summing across an enormous variety of unclassified roles that happen to share a generic title — and the average is much less meaningful. Pay attention to the title-level dispersion before drawing comparisons across agencies.

More guides: How to read a Texas state salary record · Why two people in the same job title earn different salaries · Higher-education salary supplements in Texas · A short history of Texas open-records law · How to compare two Texas state agencies fairly