The quality of the University of Utah’s programs and services is defined by our faculty. Their teaching, research and service make the U a flagship university that strives for unsurpassed social impact and student success. Thus, the U serves its students, staff and community better when it consistently supports its faculty.
The Compensation Project—a component of Mission-Aligned Planning (MAP)—seeks to systematically analyze and set Academic Affairs faculty salaries in a purposeful way to advance our research and teaching missions. The Office of the Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs (EVPAA) is working to align tenure-line and career-line faculty salaries to our peer Association of American Universities (AAU) salaries for each person’s discipline and rank, calibrated for performance. For some faculty members, this may mean that salaries will increase, and for others there may be no salary change, but certainly no salaries will be reduced because of this project.
The initial phase of this project is underway, and faculty can expect to see continued efforts to align faculty salaries at the U with our peer AAU universities in the years to come.
Reasons for change
In October 2025, the U conducted a survey to gather data regarding staff and faculty wellness across campus. The Better U Survey identified compensation as a primary concern for faculty. We heard those concerns and are addressing this issue via the Compensation Project.
“Our faculty are thought leaders who mentor, guide and create,” said Mitzi M. Montoya, Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost. “We will advance the U through consistent support and development of our faculty. The processes we are developing in our Compensation Project will ensure we have a system that is implemented fairly.”
In the case of career-line faculty, we also want to acknowledge changes in workload caused by the Utah System of Higher Education’s revised policy regarding teaching faculty workload.
“The USHE policy means that some of our career-line faculty members will have an increased teaching load. But it also requires that we ensure the equitable distribution of workload,” said Sarah Projansky, Senior Vice Provost for Faculty and Academic Affairs. “This has given us an opportunity to ensure that the teaching and service loads of our career-line faculty members are balanced. Our departments, schools and colleges are working hard on workload policies that do just that.”
By addressing compensation, we hope to incentivize excellence and raise the U’s research and teaching profile. We also expect to be more competitive in recruiting and retaining the best scholars as we align with our AAU peers.
Timelines and processes
The EVPAA team worked on an Academic Affairs-wide compensation analysis over the last academic year. By gathering benchmarking data, analyzing individuals in relation to that data and evaluating our specific funding availability and needs, we’ve created a compensation plan designed to begin addressing wage gaps and reward excellent performance.
Phase one of the project, which was effective in July 2026, included salary adjustments for lecturer and clinical career-line faculty, as necessary, to calibrate our salaries to AAU data. Raises for lecturer and clinical career-line faculty at promotion were effective July 1, 2027.
Phase two will focus on adjustments for tenure-line faculty.
“The compensation plan for tenure-line faculty has several different components,” Montoya said. “These are necessary to address long-term structural deficiencies that impact all faculty, inequities that affect a subset of faculty and merit-based components that prioritize sustained high performance in research.”
To ensure consistent processes across Academic Affairs, the EVPAA’s Office is working with deans to develop tenure-line faculty compensation analysis tools based on a combination of market standards and research analytics, combined with faculty evaluations of teaching and service effectiveness. The compensation tools use benchmark data from AAU that allows the academic units to evaluate tenure-line faculty salaries relative to other public leading research universities by discipline and rank.
Effective July 1, 2026, colleges had 1.5% available to provide tenure-line faculty with merit-based increases (in addition to the 2.5% cost-of-living adjustment), as determined by their deans and department chairs. Using the new compensation tools, additional analysis will be conducted over the fall term to determine the next round of salary adjustments that are needed, with a target implementation date in January 2027.
Phase three will expand the faculty excellence award programs.
The new Grant Research Incentive Program (GRIP), which was effective July 1, 2026, recognizes faculty members who successfully secure competitively awarded grants/contracts that are significant enough to contribute funds toward the research portion of their academic year base salary. The program rewards these faculty by providing educational and general funds to their departments to support academic initiatives. Next, we will launch the Provost’s Research Excellence Awards, which are designed to provide a bonus to reward tenure-line faculty’s research excellence, with a target effective date of spring 2027.
Results and future plans
This project is possible because of the work of many people across Academic Affairs. Efforts to grow enrollment, improve student success and make strategic operational decisions have created the opportunity to increase faculty compensation.
“I’m grateful to everyone whose dedication to our academic mission has helped make this investment possible,” Montoya said. “This work represents the contributions of faculty, staff and academic leaders across the university.
“I believe the Compensation Project will have a positive impact on all our faculty. As we work to reward excellence and increase equity in pay across Academic Affairs, I anticipate that we will be able to recruit and retain strong faculty who will continue to do incredible things in their teaching, research and service.”