NSHE Faculty Salaries

Where they've been and where they're going

The history since 2008 of NSHE faculty cost-of-living and other salary adjustments—including furloughs, salary reductions, average merit, and retirement contribution changes—is shown in the chart below. Even if the Board of Regents approves the full 11% COLA for FY2025 (pink hatched bar), take-home pay will only return to FY2015 levels in constant dollars and will reach only 89% of the salaries in FY2009.

This chart includes average merit raises (performance pay) but applies to faculty members who have not received a promotion or ad hoc raise.

Based on the 2022-2023 AAUP Faculty Compensation Survey, academic faculty salaries at UNLV and UNR were 16% below the average for faculty at doctoral universities nationwide and 23% below the average for public R1 research universities in the Western states.  Although the 12% COLA for 7/1/2023 approved by the Board of Regents will partially close that gap, other states have also implemented COLAs in the past year so it remains to be seen how much more we still need just to catch up to average.

(The AAUP survey has very limited data for community colleges.  The only other NSHE institution that participated in the survey besides UNLV and UNR was CSN, and there are few valid comparison colleges.)