How to read a Texas state salary record

Open any employee page on this site and you'll see the same handful of fields: full name, job title, agency, annualized pay, monthly rate, hire date, employment type, data year. Each one carries assumptions that aren't obvious from the label alone. Here is what each field actually represents.

Full name

Names are reproduced as published in the State of Texas payroll release, normalized to title case (so "ABBOTT, GREG" becomes "Greg Abbott") for readability. Middle initials, where present in the source, are dropped on display but retained in the underlying record. Suffixes ("Jr.", "III") and hyphenated names are preserved. Where two distinct employees share an identical name, our slugs differentiate them with a numeric suffix; the names themselves are unchanged.

Job title

The job title is the agency's classification title, not a job description. In a large agency, dozens of employees may share the same classification title even though their day-to-day work is materially different. The classification title is what determines a person's eligibility for a salary group; it is not, by itself, a signal of seniority.

Agency

The agency is the State of Texas reporting unit that pays the employee, which is not always the unit a Texan would intuitively expect. A police officer assigned to a state university campus is paid by that university, not by the Department of Public Safety. A nurse at a state psychiatric hospital is paid by the Health and Human Services Commission, not by the hospital itself. Agency assignment in this dataset reflects the payroll relationship, not the physical workplace.

Annualized pay

The headline number. For salaried employees, it is monthly base rate × 12. For hourly employees, it is hourly rate × scheduled hours × 52. This is a snapshot, not an actual paycheck total: a person hired in October will appear at their full annualized rate even though they only earned three months of pay that calendar year. To estimate what someone actually took home, you have to combine the annualized rate with the hire date and any termination/transfer events — none of which are in a single snapshot.

Monthly rate

The base monthly amount, before withholding, that drives the annualized number. Useful when comparing against an agency's published pay scale, which is almost always denominated in monthly amounts.

Hire date

The date the employee began continuous service with the State of Texas — not necessarily their start date at the current agency. A 25-year state veteran who transferred to a new agency last year will show their original 2000 hire date, not the 2024 transfer.

Employment type

The State of Texas distinguishes between several employment categories: classified vs. unclassified, regular vs. temporary, full-time vs. part-time, and several smaller buckets for specific purposes (legislative session staff, judicial staff). The types you see most often in this dataset are URF (Unclassified Regular Full-Time) and CRF (Classified Regular Full-Time). Part-time, temporary, and seasonal categories generally show prorated annualized figures; treat them with care.

What is not on the page

Bonuses, settlements, retention payments, retirement contributions, health-insurance premiums paid by the employer, and supplemental compensation from non-state funds (foundation salary supplements at universities are the largest example) are not included in the annualized pay. For the senior leadership of any large agency or university, the omitted compensation can be a substantial fraction of total cost-to-employer. Always pair the salary record with the agency's annual financial report when total compensation matters.

More guides: Why two people in the same job title earn different salaries · Higher-education salary supplements in Texas · The Texas position classification plan, briefly · A short history of Texas open-records law · How to compare two Texas state agencies fairly