This post was updated June 8 at 4:17 p.m.

Key takeaways:

• After adjusting for inflation, UCLA’s median professor pay changed relatively little between 2020 and 2024, despite nominal salaries steadily increasing over the same period.
• Faculty pay differed sharply by appointment type: In 2024, tenure-track faculty earned median salaries of $294,100, while adjunct professors earned median salaries of $97,083.
• Salary growth was strongest at the top of UCLA’s pay distribution, with the 90th-percentile teaching faculty salaries increasing by about 20.6% between 2020 and 2024.
• “Other pay” differs among different faculty groups, with lecturers having the lowest other pay percentage of 7-10% of total salaries. Other academic titles, including professors in residence, visiting professors and professors emeriti, have the greatest other pay percentage of about 30% of total compensation. 

Over the past year, UCLA has faced increasing financial uncertainty stemming from federal and state funding cuts.

President Donald Trump’s administration suspended $584 million in research funding at UCLA in July, alleging the university allowed antisemitism, affirmative action and “men to participate in women’s sports.” Court orders issued in August and September restored the vast majority of the grants, and California Gov. Gavin Newsom deferred funding to the UC as the state attempted to address a multibillion-dollar budget deficit in 2025. 

UCLA is projected to generate a $220 million deficit for the 2025-26 fiscal year, interim vice chancellor and chief financial officer Reem Hanna-Harwell said in a March campuswide email. 

The financial pressure has prompted university administrators to evaluate cost-saving measures. In November, Chancellor Julio Frenk announced the creation of an Executive Budget Action Group to help manage UCLA’s financial outlook amid rising operational costs.

But despite uncertainty surrounding the university’s budget, faculty pay at UCLA has remained relatively stable over the past five years after accounting for inflation.

When adjusted for inflation, median professor pay changed relatively little between 2020 and 2024. While nominal salaries increased over the same period, much of that growth was reflected in inflation rather than substantial increases in purchasing power.

Faculty compensation is determined through the UC’s academic personnel policies, which account for appointment type, rank and step progression, a UCLA spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

Different UC campuses have different professor salaries. While UCLA’s inflation-adjusted median professor pay was consistently above $220,000 between 2020 and 2024, UC Merced and UC Riverside’s inflation-adjusted median professor pay sat at or below $160,000 for the same period.

Although overall pay remained relatively steady after inflation adjustments, salaries differed substantially across faculty title groups.

At UCLA, faculty appointments span multiple classifications – including tenure-track professors, lecturers, adjunct faculty and nontenure professorial faculty – with each tied to separate pay scales and promotion systems.

Adjunct professors are primarily involved in research and have limited teaching responsibilities, or vice versa, according to the Academic Affairs and Personnel website. Adjunct faculty are not eligible for the tenure track. Adjunct professors also include assistant adjunct professors and associate adjunct professors.

Lecturers are faculty members hired solely for certain teaching duties and are not considered professors, according to Article 5 of the University Council-American Federation of Teachers Package Proposal. Lecturers, including continuing lecturers and senior continuing lecturers, are represented by UC-AFT.

Assistant professors are on the tenure track but have not reached tenure yet, and they focus on both teaching and research. They become tenured when promoted to associate professor or professor.

Tenure-track professors maintain their job title until they are retired, demoted or dismissed from the university. To be eligible for tenure, the university considers individual qualification, retention, need and funding availability, according to the Academic Affairs and Personnel website.

Other academic titles include professors in residence, visiting professors, acting professors, professors emeriti, professors of teaching and professors with single titles. Each of these titles makes up a small portion of the UCLA teaching faculty, so they were aggregated into one job title.

Among the title groups, adjunct faculty and lecturers had the lowest median salaries at about $100,000 annually, while tenure-track faculty earned substantially higher median pay. Inflation-adjusted salaries across most groups remained relatively stable between 2020 and 2024, suggesting UCLA salary scale increases for teaching faculty broadly kept pace with inflation during the period.

Thomas Maierhofer, a lecturer in UCLA’s Department of Statistics and Data Science, said the university’s pay structure makes the hiring and salary process relatively transparent.

Maierhofer, who completed his doctoral degree at UCLA before becoming a lecturer, said his compensation was predetermined through union-negotiated contracts between the UC and UC-AFT.

“My salary was not up for negotiation,” Maierhofer said. “It was something I could look up in the most recent negotiated contract between UC and AFT.”

Maierhofer added that while lecturer salaries may not match private industry compensation, the position still provides long-term stability and flexibility within academia. 

“We work hard, we get paid OK – though not as much as we could be paid working in industry – and I trust the department to continue protecting us,” Maierhofer said.

Still, salary growth has not been evenly distributed across UCLA faculty.

While median salaries increased moderately between 2020 and 2024, salaries at the top end of UCLA’s teaching faculty grew faster. The university’s 90th-percentile salary increased by about 20.6% during that period, compared with a 17.8% increase in median salaries.

Gary Hansen, a professor of economics who served as chair of UCLA’s economics department during the 2000s, said he believes those differences in salary often reflect the competitive pressures universities face when trying to recruit and retain faculty.

“There was a tremendous amount of effort to poach our faculty in economics and hire them away with higher salaries,” Hansen said. “We would have to come up with retention packages.”

Hansen said salary growth at research universities is often closely tied to outside job offers, research productivity and the university’s ability to remain competitive with peer institutions.

“If there’s a lot of salary pressure for salaries to go up, you could just say, ‘Go out and get an outside offer,’” Hansen said. “UCLA understood that.”

Hansen added that faculty merit reviews are also heavily shaped by research impact and national reputation.

Base salary represents only part of faculty compensation at UCLA.

Across several faculty title groups, a substantial share of earnings came from the university’s other pay category, which includes compensation beyond standard salary scales.

Other pay can include summer teaching appointments, grant-funded research compensation, negotiated clinical pay, performance-based incentives, payouts tied to union bargaining agreements and compensation for additional clinical responsibilities, according to the UC Office of Institutional Research and Academic Planning.

The UC’s compensation database does not provide specific information about the other pay faculty members receive. The share of compensation coming from the category varied across faculty groups.

Lecturers received other pay that was 7-10% of their total pay. Adjunct professors received other pay that was 11-14% of their total pay. Nontenure professors received other pay that was about 16-18% of their total pay. Tenured professors received other pay that was 19-21% of their total pay. Other academic faculty received other pay that was 29-32% of their total pay.

Nearly 70% of teaching faculty receive some form of other pay.

But for many early career academics, compensation remains only one factor shaping where they choose to work.

Kent Vashaw, a Hedrick Math Fellow in UCLA’s mathematics department, said postdoctoral and fellowship positions are often viewed less as long-term jobs and more as stepping stones toward future tenure-track careers.

Vashaw, a mathematics postdoctoral student, said he chose UCLA largely because of its research environment and the opportunity to prepare for tenure-track positions.

“The point of doing a postdoc or doing a math fellow-type position is, typically as a recent Ph.D. graduate, building up your research program,” Vashaw said.

While salary still matters – particularly in a city with a high cost of living – Vashaw said he believes long-term career growth and research opportunities often outweigh compensation differences between universities.

“When I’m considering different places, I’m definitely not looking at them and saying which one is offering the most money,” Vashaw said. “I’m saying, ‘Out of the ones offering a salary that I could live off of, which place is going to be the best for my long-term career?’”

About the data:

The data used in this analysis comes from the University of California’s publicly available Annual Wage database, which reports payroll and compensation information for UC employees across campuses and appointment types. Salary figures analyzed in this article include gross pay and additional compensation categories reported by the UC Office of the President.