A short history of Texas open-records law

Public-employee salary disclosure in Texas isn't a courtesy or a transparency-portal feature; it's a legal default established by statute. Here is the short version of how that came to be and what the narrow exceptions look like.

The Public Information Act

Texas's open-records framework is the Public Information Act, codified at Government Code Chapter 552. Adopted in its modern form in 1973, the act establishes a presumption that information held by a governmental body in connection with the transaction of official business is public information. Salary, title, employment dates, and similar payroll information of state employees are explicitly within scope.

The act is not, by itself, a "publish-everything" mandate. Rather, it gives any member of the public the right to request and receive public information from a state agency. The state's open-data portal, the Comptroller's transparency site, and downstream republishers like the Texas Tribune (which we mirror) exist because individual people and organizations have used Chapter 552 to obtain payroll snapshots and then republished them in machine-readable form.

Why salaries specifically

Of all the categories of public-employee information, salary is the one Texas courts and the Attorney General's office have most consistently held to be unambiguously public. The reasoning is that if the public is paying the salary, the public is entitled to know what is being paid. Internal personnel matters, performance reviews, medical records, and disciplinary investigations are treated very differently and generally not subject to disclosure; the salary number itself is not.

The narrow exemptions

A handful of categories of state employees have specific statutory protection from public disclosure of identifying details (though not necessarily their salary number in the aggregate). Examples include: certain undercover law-enforcement officers, victim-services personnel whose identities are protected for safety reasons, and a small number of judicial branch employees in sensitive roles. The State of Texas applies a "hide-from-search" flag to these records before publication, and we honor that flag. As a result, you will not find a record on this site for an employee whose identity is statutorily protected, even though the agency-level total payroll figure does include them.

Federal-funded employees

Employees paid out of federal grant funds rather than state appropriations are sometimes treated differently, depending on the grant. Most still appear in the state payroll snapshot because the agency is the employer of record. A small number, employed under federal cooperative agreements, do not.

What this means for users of this site

The salary records on this site are fully and unambiguously public-record information under Texas law. There is no reasonable expectation of privacy in this data. By the same token, the people whose names appear on this site did not opt in to any particular republishing arrangement; they are listed because state law makes their compensation public. We try to honor that distinction by publishing only the public-record fields and by not enriching records with anything that would suggest a stance on any individual employee. We are an index, not a personnel review.

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 · The Texas position classification plan, briefly · How to compare two Texas state agencies fairly