How Much Do College Professors Make in 2026? Salary Guide by Rank, Field, and Institution

How much do university professors make? Postsecondary teachers, the BLS category for college and university professors, earned a median of $85,330 in May 2025. The median was $96,120 at state colleges and universities, $89,660 at private ones, and $68,160 at state junior colleges. Law ($128,500), economics ($123,920), and engineering ($109,270) professors earn the most.

Anyone asking how much a college professor makes has probably already sensed that the honest answer is "it depends enormously." The BLS median of $85,330 for postsecondary teachers is the best national anchor available, but a professor's actual paycheck is shaped by forces that a single median cannot show, and understanding those forces is more useful than memorizing one number. At Metaintro, we follow faculty hiring and pay closely, and the sections below break the number down the way a candidate actually needs it.

How Much Do College Professors Make on Average?

The federal government's clearest measure comes from the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program, which reports a median annual wage of $85,330 for postsecondary teachers as of May 2025. This is an aggregate figure covering the broad Standard Occupational Classification group 25-1000, which folds together professors, instructors, and lecturers across nearly every college subject, from art history to zoology, at two-year and four-year institutions, public and private, full professor and instructor rank alike.

That breadth is both the strength and the limitation of the number. It is strong because it is drawn from a nationally representative federal survey rather than a self-reported salary site, so it is grounded in real payroll data reported by employers to the government. It is limited because "college professor" as most people picture it, a tenured or tenure-track faculty member teaching a specific discipline at a four-year university, is not something the BLS breaks out on its own. The agency does publish more granular estimates for a handful of specific teaching fields, such as business teachers, engineering teachers, and nursing instructors, but there is no separate line item for "college professor across all disciplines." The $85,330 figure is the nearest verifiable anchor, and it is the number this guide uses throughout, but readers should understand it describes the entire postsecondary teaching workforce rather than any one professor's specific situation.

For context on how that median compares to workforce-wide employer sentiment, it helps to remember that hiring itself remains a genuinely difficult exercise for most employers right now. According to SHRM's 2025 talent trends research, 69% of organizations reported difficulty recruiting for full-time positions, down from 77% the year before but still elevated relative to a decade ago. Academic hiring committees are not immune to that same competitive pressure, particularly in fields like nursing, engineering, and computer science where PhD holders have strong industry alternatives.

The broader occupational profile for this group, cataloged under Standard Occupational Classification 25-1000, is also summarized in the federal government's O*NET occupational database, which lists typical tasks, required education, and related job titles for postsecondary teachers. That profile is useful context for anyone trying to understand how broadly the category is drawn before comparing it to a specific faculty role.

The median annual wage for postsecondary teachers was $85,330 in May 2025. Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

How Much Do University Professors Make by Institution and Field?

The BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook breaks the $85,330 median down by employer and by teaching field. Median annual wages in May 2025 by institution type:

• Colleges, universities, and professional schools (state): $96,120
• Colleges, universities, and professional schools (private): $89,660
• Junior colleges (local): $81,640
• Junior colleges (state): $68,160

Selected median annual wages by teaching field, May 2025:

• Law teachers: $128,500
• Economics teachers: $123,920
• Engineering teachers: $109,270
• Health specialties teachers: $107,310
• Family and consumer sciences teachers: $75,870
• Education teachers: $75,350

The BLS projects employment of postsecondary teachers to grow 7 percent from 2025 to 2035, with about 103,300 openings a year. For two-year campuses specifically, see how much community college professors make.

Why Does Academic Rank Change a Professor's Paycheck So Much?

Academic rank is one of the clearest structural drivers of professor pay, and it functions almost like a ladder with wide rungs. A newly hired assistant professor, someone in their first tenure-track role after finishing a doctorate, typically earns the least of the tenure-line ranks. Associate professors, who have usually earned tenure and spent five to seven years building a research and teaching record, earn more. Full professors, who have often spent fifteen or twenty years in the field and taken on senior departmental or university leadership, sit at the top of the tenure-line scale.

Layered on top of rank is tenure status itself. Tenure-track and tenured faculty occupy a different labor market than the large and growing population of non-tenure-track instructors, lecturers, and adjuncts, who are frequently paid per course rather than on an annual salary scale. The American Association of University Professors has tracked this shift for years and has documented that a majority of instructional staff at U.S. colleges now hold contingent, non-tenure-track appointments. That single structural fact does more to explain the wide range beneath the BLS median than almost any other variable, because a part-time adjunct teaching two courses a semester and a tenured full professor teaching the same subject at the same university can have annual incomes that are not remotely comparable.

Department chairs and endowed chairholders sit above even senior full professors in most compensation structures, often receiving a stipend or course-release value on top of their base salary in exchange for administrative duties. Academic deans and provosts, while technically administrators rather than teaching faculty, are frequently drawn from the professor ranks and can see compensation climb well past what classroom-only faculty earn. None of these rank-based distinctions show up in a single BLS median, which is exactly why rank has to be treated as its own independent variable when estimating what a specific professor role pays.

Doctoral training itself also shapes where someone enters this rank ladder. The Council of Graduate Schools tracks national trends in PhD completion and placement, and its data underscores how competitive the tenure-track market has become relative to the supply of new doctorate holders in many fields, which is part of why so many newly minted PhDs now start in visiting, postdoctoral, or non-tenure-track roles rather than landing a tenure-track line immediately.

What Role Does Academic Field Play in Professor Salaries?

Field of study is arguably the single largest driver of variation within the broad postsecondary teaching category, and it follows a logic that will feel familiar to anyone who has watched undergraduate majors sort themselves by expected earnings. Fields that compete directly with well-paying industry jobs for the same PhD or terminal-degree talent pool tend to pay faculty more, because a university has to offer something at least in the neighborhood of what a private employer would pay to keep that person teaching instead of consulting or working in industry.

Business school faculty, particularly in finance, accounting, and information systems, are frequently among the highest-paid professors on a campus, in part because business school accreditation bodies such as the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business require institutions to benchmark faculty pay against market alternatives to remain accredited. Engineering and computer science faculty follow a similar pattern, particularly at research universities competing for faculty who could otherwise work at technology companies. Law school faculty, especially those with a joint JD and PhD or extensive practice experience, are also typically compensated well above the postsecondary teaching median, reflecting both the earning power of a law degree and the competitive market for legal scholars accredited through bodies like the American Bar Association.

Health sciences fields, particularly nursing, pharmacy, and medicine, occupy their own distinct pay tier, frequently shaped by clinical practice income that supplements a base academic salary. The humanities, arts, and education, by contrast, tend to sit toward the lower end of the professor pay scale, not because those disciplines are less academically rigorous but because the labor market for PhD holders in those fields includes far fewer well-paying non-academic alternatives, which reduces the competitive pressure on universities to raise pay. Anyone comparing a specific faculty offer against "the average professor salary" should first ask what field is being compared, because a philosophy professor and a finance professor sit in the same BLS occupational bucket but occupy almost entirely different labor markets.

Research universities themselves are typically classified by the scale of their research activity, and membership organizations such as the Association of American Universities group together the institutions with the largest, most well-funded research enterprises. Faculty at these institutions, particularly in STEM fields, are often expected to bring in external grant funding, and departments at AAU member institutions frequently pay a premium in fields where federal or industry research dollars are abundant.

Does Public or Private Employment Change What Professors Earn?

Institution type is another major variable, and the relationship is not always intuitive. Private research universities with large endowments, particularly those in the Ivy League or among other well-resourced private institutions, often pay the highest salaries in American higher education, especially at the full professor rank, because they have the resource base to compete aggressively for top research talent. Public flagship universities, funded partly through state appropriations and partly through tuition, generally pay somewhat less than their best-resourced private peers but still sit well above the broader postsecondary teaching median, particularly for tenured faculty at large research-intensive campuses.

Community colleges represent a distinct tier again. Faculty at two-year institutions, tracked in part by organizations like the American Association of Community Colleges, typically teach a heavier course load with less expectation of active research output, and base salaries tend to run below four-year institution norms, though the gap is frequently narrower than people assume once benefits and course-load differences are accounted for. Public institution pay is also often more transparent than private institution pay, since many state university systems publish faculty salary schedules or make salary data subject to public records requests, while private university salaries are typically confidential outside of what is voluntarily disclosed.

Religiously affiliated and smaller private liberal arts colleges occupy a wide range depending on endowment size and tuition-dependence, and some of the most financially strained small private colleges pay meaningfully below the public university norm. The American Association of University Professors has published annual faculty compensation surveys for decades precisely because institution type explains so much of the variance that a single number cannot.

Accreditation status is another background factor worth knowing, since it constrains an institution's ability to award degrees and receive federal financial aid dollars. Regional accreditors such as the Higher Learning Commission and the umbrella oversight body the Council for Higher Education Accreditation periodically review faculty qualifications and staffing levels as part of their standards, and an institution under accreditation review or facing financial distress can see faculty hiring and pay both slow considerably until its status stabilizes.

How Much Does Geography Affect a Professor's Salary?

Location interacts with institution type and field in ways that mirror the broader labor market. Metro areas with a high cost of living, particularly coastal cities in the Northeast and on the West Coast, generally offer higher nominal faculty salaries, both because local living costs demand it and because those regions concentrate a large share of the country's wealthiest research universities. States with a dense cluster of well-funded public flagship and private research universities, such as Massachusetts, California, and New York, tend to post some of the highest average professor salaries in national surveys, while faculty in lower cost-of-living states, particularly in parts of the South and Midwest, often see lower nominal pay that may or may not translate into lower real purchasing power once local housing and living costs are factored in.

International competition also shapes pay for specific in-demand fields. Universities recruiting for endowed chairs in fields like artificial intelligence, biotechnology, or finance sometimes compete not just with American industry but with well-funded universities and research institutes abroad, which can push top-end offers in those fields well above regional norms. State funding cycles matter too. Public university systems that have faced budget cuts or hiring freezes, a pattern well documented by higher education policy groups such as the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association, have in some years seen faculty salaries stagnate even as cost of living rose, widening the real-world gap between the best-funded and most resource-constrained public campuses.

Broader public policy advocacy in this space, including work by the American Council on Education and state land-grant coalitions such as the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, regularly tracks how state appropriation levels move in relation to enrollment and inflation, and that appropriation trend is one of the clearest leading indicators of whether public faculty salaries in a given state are likely to rise or stay flat in the coming budget cycle.

Why Do Adjunct and Part-Time Faculty Earn So Much Less Than the Median Suggests?

No discussion of professor pay is complete without confronting the adjunct question directly, because it is the single biggest reason the postsecondary teaching median understates the experience of a large share of the people actually teaching college courses. Adjunct and part-time faculty are typically paid per course rather than on an annual salary scale, and a realistic adjunct teaching load, when annualized, frequently falls well below what a full-time tenure-track salary would suggest, and they frequently receive no health insurance, retirement contribution, or job security tied to the position.

This is not a small or fringe part of the academic labor market. National reporting from organizations tracking the professoriate, including data referenced by the American Federation of Teachers' higher education division, has documented for years that contingent faculty, adjuncts, and non-tenure-track instructors now make up a majority of instructional staff at many U.S. colleges and universities. That means the "average professor" a student actually encounters in a classroom is statistically more likely to be a part-time or contingent instructor than a tenured full professor, even though tenured full professors anchor the top of the pay distribution and dominate discussions about what "professors make."

This dynamic has become enough of a public issue that unions representing higher education workers, including affiliates tracked through the American Association of University Professors' collective bargaining resources, have organized specifically around adjunct pay parity and job security in recent years. Anyone using the BLS median as a benchmark for a specific adjunct teaching opportunity should understand that the median is pulled upward by full-time tenure-track and tenured salaries, and a per-course adjunct rate can sit dramatically below it.

For per-course rates and how adjunct pay is structured, see our adjunct professor salary guide.

How Does a Professor's Pay Compare With Other Credentialed Professions?

It is worth putting professor pay in a broader labor market context, because prospective PhD students and career-changers often implicitly compare an academic career against alternative paths that require similarly long training. Fields that require a doctorate or professional degree, such as law, medicine, and certain engineering specialties, frequently offer higher starting compensation outside academia than a new assistant professor earns inside it, which is part of why business, engineering, and health science departments have to pay faculty more competitively than humanities departments do.

Employers across the broader economy are also shifting how they evaluate candidates in ways relevant to anyone weighing an academic path against an industry one. Research from the National Association of Colleges and Employers found that 70% of employers now report using skills-based hiring practices, up from 65% the year before, with employers relying on it most heavily during interviewing and screening. That shift matters for PhD holders considering industry roles, because it suggests that demonstrable applied skills, not just a terminal degree or years in a doctoral program, increasingly shape hiring outcomes outside the university, which changes the calculus of staying in a lower-paying academic field versus moving to industry.

Separately, SHRM research on how recruiters actually evaluate candidates found that years of experience and type of experience are weighted most heavily in the initial review, while education level itself is weighted comparatively lightly. For someone with a doctorate weighing an academic offer against an industry alternative, that data point is a useful reminder that a PhD alone does not guarantee a pay premium once the candidate leaves the academic labor market, and the industry side of that comparison is judged on different criteria entirely.

70% of employers report using skills-based hiring, up from 65% the prior year, with the heaviest use during interviewing (87%) and screening (65%). Source: National Association of Colleges and Employers.

What Can a Prospective or Current Professor Do With This Information?

Given how much variation sits underneath a single national median, the most useful thing a prospective faculty member, postdoc, or current professor evaluating an offer can do is decompose that offer into its component parts rather than comparing it against one blended number. Start with the specific field and subfield, since a search committee in accounting and a search committee in comparative literature are drawing from entirely different applicant pools with entirely different market benchmarks. Next, confirm the rank and tenure status attached to the offer, since a visiting assistant professor position and a tenure-track assistant professor position can carry the same title but very different long-term compensation trajectories.

From there, weigh institution type and location together, since a public flagship in a high cost-of-living state and a well-endowed private college in a lower cost-of-living region can produce similar real purchasing power through very different nominal salary numbers. Ask directly about the teaching load, service expectations, and summer funding, since academic salaries are typically quoted on a nine-month or twelve-month basis and confusing the two inflates or deflates a comparison significantly. Faculty considering a move between institutions should also request the institution's own faculty salary survey participation data where available, since many universities benchmark against national surveys published by groups like the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources, and asking where an offer sits relative to that peer benchmark is a legitimate and increasingly common negotiating question.

Lacey Kaelani, CEO of Metaintro, told Spiceworks, “Senior and specialized roles also have the added benefit, because companies are more willing to trade off location for specialized talent when there aren’t many options.” That is why the strongest offers in this field cluster around the narrowest specialisms rather than the biggest cities alone.

Finally, remember that academic compensation is rarely just base salary. Retirement contributions through plans often administered in partnership with organizations like TIAA, health benefits, research startup funds, course releases, summer research stipends, and moving allowances can meaningfully change the total value of an offer even when the base salary looks unremarkable next to the BLS median. A thorough comparison has to account for all of it, not just the headline number on the offer letter.

When you are ready to push back on a faculty offer, our guide on how to negotiate a job offer covers how to ask about startup funds, course releases, and salary without straining the relationship with the search committee.

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People Also Asked

Q: How much does the average college professor make per year?

A: The BLS reports a median annual wage of $85,330 for postsecondary teachers as of May 2025, which is the broad occupational category covering college and university faculty across all fields, ranks, and institution types. Actual pay for any individual professor can sit well above or below that median depending on discipline, tenure status, and the type of institution employing them.

Q: Do full professors make significantly more than assistant professors?

A: Yes. Academic rank is one of the strongest predictors of pay within the professoriate, and full professors, who have typically spent well over a decade advancing through the tenure system, consistently earn more than newly hired assistant professors in the same department and field. The gap widens further for professors who hold endowed chairs or take on administrative roles like department chair or dean.

Q: Why do adjunct professors get paid so much less than the reported average?

A: Adjunct and part-time faculty are typically paid per course rather than on an annual salary scale, and a realistic adjunct teaching load, when annualized, frequently falls well below the pay a full-time tenure-track position would offer, often without benefits attached. Because a large and growing share of American college instruction is now delivered by contingent faculty, the gap between the BLS postsecondary teaching median and a typical adjunct's actual annual income can be substantial.

Q: How much do university professors make a year?

A: The BLS median for postsecondary teachers was $85,330 in May 2025. At four-year institutions the medians run higher: $96,120 at state colleges and universities and $89,660 at private ones.

Q: Which professors make the most money?

A: By field, law teachers ($128,500), economics teachers ($123,920), engineering teachers ($109,270), and health specialties teachers ($107,310) had the highest medians in May 2025, according to the BLS. Full professors at well-funded research universities sit at the top of the range.

Q: Do university professors make more than community college professors?

A: Generally yes. In May 2025 the median was $96,120 at state colleges and universities versus $68,160 at state junior colleges and $81,640 at local junior colleges. Course loads and research expectations differ too.

Wondering what you should earn? Metaintro tracks how faculty pay moves across employers, regions and experience levels, so you can check a number against the market instead of guessing. Create a free profile to see roles matched to your experience.