In the 2024 to 2025 academic year, the average full time faculty salary hit $105,657, the second year in a row it crossed six figures.

Now forget that number. It hides almost everything interesting.

Underneath that tidy average is a system where your paycheck depends heavily on your school’s endowment, your subject, your state, your gender, and whether your institution was set up to fail from the start.

Here’s what the data actually shows once you stop looking at the average and start looking at the spread.

A handful of schools are dragging the average up

According to the latest data from the U.S Department of Education’s College Scorecard, Princeton pays its professors an average of $304,248 a year.

Stanford pays $302,376.

Harvard pays $300,576.

That’s roughly three times the national average, at three schools.

Most professors are nowhere near it.

Want to check your own school, or one you’re considering? There’s a searchable database further down.

The raise you got barely counted

Salaries rose 3.6% this year. Inflation ran about 2.6%. Do the subtraction and faculty gained roughly 1.0% in real purchasing power. Not nothing, but not much either.

Adjusted for inflation, faculty pay in 2024 to 2025 still sits 5.9% below its pre pandemic high of $112,233 from 2019 to 2020. It’s also still below the pre Great Recession peak of $109,606 from 2008 to 2009.

Every rank took a hit. Full, associate, and assistant professors have all lost roughly 7% of their real purchasing power since their pre pandemic peak. Instructors are down about 5%, lecturers about 3%.

So the paycheck looks bigger than ever. What it actually buys hasn’t caught up.

What you teach matters more than where you teach

Pick health sciences and you’ll average $127,000. Pick library science and you’ll average $80,000. Same job title, same tenure track, wildly different outcomes.

Health professors earn the most of any subject at four year universities, an average of $129,000.

At two year colleges, that same subject pays the least, just $81,000.

Meanwhile arts, communications, history, and humanities professors average $83,000 at two year colleges, making them one of the better paid groups there, but only $94,000 at four year schools, where they rank second from the bottom.

Same degree. Same discipline. Opposite position in the pay ladder depending on the type of school.

The more prestigious the school, the wider the gender gap

Nationally, women in higher ed earn 86% of what men earn.

That’s actually a bit better than the broader US labor market, where the figure is closer to 82%.

Women make up 49% of the academic workforce overall, and 54 to 57% of faculty at two year colleges.

But they’re only 36% of full professors at major research universities, which is exactly where the biggest paychecks live.

Geography decides a huge chunk of your paycheck

At public four year universities, the national average sits at $107,874.

California tops the list at $143,417.

New Jersey is second at $135,787.

Private four year schools pay more on average, $115,633 nationally.

New Jersey leads that list too, at $149,505, with Massachusetts close behind at $146,618.

A few state level details worth flagging. Nevada was the only state to raise public four year salaries by more than 10% in a single year, an 11.7% jump that moved it from 15th to 8th nationally, up to $117,188.

On the other end, Arkansas ($77,848), Mississippi ($80,596), and Louisiana ($80,816) sit at the bottom of the public four year rankings.

Their cost of living is also much lower, so the real gap in purchasing power is probably smaller than the raw numbers suggest.

So what's the real story

The headline number, that comfortable six figure average, is technically true and almost useless on its own.

The real story is a system stretched between a handful of schools paying near executive salaries and a much larger group of faculty who haven't recovered the purchasing power they had five years ago.

Your actual paycheck depends less on having a PhD and more on your subject, your state, your school's tax status, your gender, and whether your institution was ever funded the way it was legally supposed to be.