Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession Now Available

Today, the AAUP released The Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, 2025-26. The report is grounded in the AAUP Faculty Compensation Survey, which the Association has administered annually since 1958, and uses the survey as the empirical foundation for a wider assessment of faculty compensation and the profession's economic condition.

The 2025-26 survey concluded in March 2026, with 768 colleges and universities providing data on 359,234 full-time faculty members, 664 institutions providing data on 125,149 part-time faculty members, and 484 institutions reporting data on senior administrators.

Economic and Political Context

The report begins by situating faculty compensation inside a turbulent setting shaped by inflation, political interference, volatile research funding, uneven enrollment recovery, persistent reliance on contingent labor, and widening financial disparities across colleges and universities. It also points to recent federal actions targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, instability in research support, strain on the federal higher education data infrastructure, and new reporting burdens on institutional research offices. Finally, the report frames faculty compensation as a governance issue: Salary patterns reveal whether institutions are protecting the people and practices that sustain teaching, research, and shared governance, or whether they are increasingly being driven by crisis management and external pressure.

Full-Time Faculty Compensation

The central pay finding is sobering. In nominal terms-that is, in current dollars-average full-time faculty salaries rose 2.3 percent from fall 2024 to fall 2025. But inflation, as measured by the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U), rose 2.7 percent over the same period, leaving average full-time faculty salaries down about 0.4 percent in real, inflation-adjusted terms. The longer view is equally striking: Real average full-time faculty salaries remain about 9.5 percent below their fall 2019 level and about 5.8 percent below their fall 2008 level. Among the 752 institutions with comparable full-time salary data in both 2024-25 and 2025-26, only 40.6 percent posted salary growth that exceeded inflation, even though 81.8 percent reported a nominal increase.

In 2025-26, 98.4 percent of full-time faculty members were eligible to participate in retirement plans and 96.1 percent actually participated. Average employer expenditures were $13,281 for covered faculty members and $13,293 for participating faculty members. Medical benefits were similarly widespread: 99.0 percent of full-time faculty members were eligible, 91.7 percent participated, and average employer expenditures were $15,034 for covered faculty members and $15,147 for participating faculty members.

Gender Equity

Gender-based salary inequity also remained a central finding. Across all full-time faculty ranks combined, women earned an average of $108,678, compared with $130,064 for men, meaning that women earned 83.6 percent of men's average salary. The widest within-rank gap remained at the full professor level: women full professors earned $150,245 on average, compared with $172,101 for men, a salary-equity ratio of 87.3.

Administrator Salaries

Administrator compensation remained another major story. Median presidential salaries ranged from about $275,000 at public associate's institutions without ranking systems to $850,000 at private-independent doctoral universities. Depending on sector and institutional type, presidential compensation ranged from roughly three times to more than five times the average salary of a full professor. That ratio remains one of the clearest illustrations of the widening gap between executive compensation and faculty pay.

Part-Time Faculty Compensation

Average pay for a standard three-credit course section was $4,093 in 2024-25 across 428 reporting institutions. The report's expanded minimum-pay reporting adds more detail than previous reports: 556 institutions reported minimum pay per course section, the median minimum was $3,130, nearly one-fifth of institutions reported minimum pay above $5,000, and 70 percent reported minimum pay of $4,000 or less. Benefits for part-time faculty members paid per course section remained thin, with just 32.7 percent of institutions contributing toward retirement for some or all such faculty members and 30.6 percent contributing toward medical insurance premiums. The overall message is plain: Part-time faculty compensation remains low, fragmented, and insecure.

Beyond Compensation: What This Year's Annual Report Provides

This year's annual report does more than publish annual salary figures. It expands outward to the academic workforce, institutional finances, and the methodological cautions necessary for reading compensation data responsibly. It also underscores the continuing shift away from tenure: Only 31.8 percent of faculty members held full-time tenured or tenure-track appointments in fall 2023, compared with 53.1 percent in fall 1987, while 68.2 percent held either part-time or full-time contingent appointments. Finally, the report links compensation to tenure, shared governance, transparency, and the broader educational mission of higher education.

About the AAUP Faculty Compensation Survey

This year's survey closed in March 2026 and includes data from 768 institutions on 359,234 full-time faculty members, 664 institutions on 125,149 part-time faculty members, and 484 institutions on senior administrators. Participating campuses included approximately 285 doctoral universities, 210 regional universities, 190 liberal arts colleges, 65 community colleges, and 160 minority-serving institutions.

The report and associated data can be found on the AAUP website at https://www.aaup.org/our-work/research/FCS. Supplemental data may be explored on the AAUP's interactive data website, which includes drilldown capabilities and tools for summarizing data by region, state, institution size, Carnegie Classification, and other variables. Datasets are available for order now.