University of Washington professor salaries are public, but they are not simple. The figure a professor sees on a paycheck depends on rank, discipline, the specific campus where the appointment sits, and how much of that pay comes from state appropriations, research grants, clinical revenue, or tuition. Anyone searching a UW salary database in 2026 is looking at a base salary that may leave out summer research pay, overload teaching, and medical practice plan income.
That gap between the public record and the full compensation package is where the salary story actually lives. The records exist because UW is a state agency, and most employee pay falls under Washington's Public Records Act. For prospective faculty, current employees, and the state taxpayers who fund the university, those records are a starting point, not the final answer.
Why one University of Washington professor salary does not exist
UW employs professors on three campuses—Seattle, Bothell, and Tacoma—and under many appointment types. A tenure-track assistant professor in English, a clinical assistant professor in the School of Medicine, and a professor in the Foster School of Business are all University of Washington professors. Their pay is built from different revenue streams and set against different outside job markets.
Base academic-year salary usually covers a nine-month service period. Most faculty are appointed from roughly mid-September through mid-June, and many can earn additional salary for summer research, grant-funded work, or an extra teaching appointment. Senior faculty with endowed chairs, deanships, or center directorships may also receive administrative stipends that appear in different ways in the published data.
- Discipline and its outside salary market
- Campus mission as a research or primarily undergraduate institution
- Rank and time since promotion
- Clinical, administrative, or named-chair income
Base salary bands by rank, based on recent public records
Public records from the university’s salary database show how wide the ranges run. These are rounded bands, not an official salary schedule. UW does not publish a fixed step table for professorial ranks the way a school district does for teachers.
| Rank | Typical base salary range | Main drivers | Caveat |
|---|---|---|---|
| Assistant Professor | About $85,000 to $170,000 | Department, campus, and market offers | Computing, business, and law hires can exceed the top of this range |
| Associate Professor | About $105,000 to $220,000 | Promotion history, research productivity, and retention offers | Clinical associate professors often sit higher |
| Professor | About $140,000 to $320,000 | Seniority, endowed chairs, and administrative roles | Some medical and business faculty exceed $400,000 |
A new assistant professor in a humanities department can start below six figures at the Seattle campus, while a new assistant professor in computer science or business can receive more than $150,000 because the university is competing with industry and with peer departments elsewhere. The same rank means different things in different schools, and the public data makes that visible rather than smoothing it over.
Photo by Lokesh B Masania on Unsplash
What the base number does not show
Base salary is the most commonly cited figure and the least complete one. On a nine-month appointment, a professor who wins a federal research grant can charge up to three months of summer salary to the grant, effectively adding as much as 33 percent to the nine-month base. Clinical faculty in UW Medicine may have an academic base salary plus a practice plan component tied to patient care. The university’s public records typically list the institutional base, not the full practice plan payment.
UW Human Resources compensation policies describe how base pay is set for academic personnel. For faculty, the actual total will also reflect endowed professorships, named chairs, and retention offers designed to keep a sought-after professor from leaving for another university.
Seattle, Bothell, and Tacoma: one university, three pay scales
UW Seattle, the flagship and largest research campus, tends to pay the highest professorial salaries. UW Bothell and UW Tacoma are smaller, more undergraduate-focused campuses with less grant and clinical revenue. Their faculty salaries are typically lower than Seattle’s for the same rank and discipline, though the gap narrows in some professional fields.
This is not a simple underpayment story. The campuses draw different faculty in different fields, have different teaching loads, and generate different amounts of research funding. Still, the public salary records make the three-campus comparison easy to run, and prospective hires should run it before negotiating an offer.
What the 2026 salary cycle will actually look like
For the 2025 and 2026 budget cycles, annual faculty salary increases at UW typically run through a salary pool approved by the Board of Regents. That pool is distributed through merit reviews, promotion increases, and market or equity adjustments. A state budget allocation is the first step; the translation layer is the provost’s office, deans, and department chairs deciding who gets what.
The University of Washington Office of Planning & Budgeting publishes salary data and compensation analyses that let the public track those decisions. New 2026–27 salary data will not appear until the academic year begins, but the 2025–26 figures provide the baseline that any raise percentage is applied to.
Faculty members should read a stated pool—say, a 3 percent salary pool—as an average ceiling, not a personal guarantee. High performers may receive more, low performers less, and market adjustments may redirect money toward departments with retention problems. The budget line and the pay stub are linked but never identical.
Reading the public database without misreading it
Washington’s public records law makes individual base salaries searchable by name, title, department, and campus. The sensible way to use the database is to compare a specific rank and field within the same campus, not to treat all “professor” entries as interchangeable. A professor of laboratory medicine listed at $380,000 and a professor of art history listed at $160,000 are not evidence of unequal pay for equal work. They are evidence of different labor markets, different revenue sources, and sometimes decades of accumulated service.
The American Association of University Professors publishes comparative faculty salary data that helps place UW among peer institutions. The pattern holds across public research universities: medicine, business, law, and computing pay substantially more, while disciplines without a private-sector salary competitor sit lower. The gap is not created in a single budget meeting; it is the accumulated result of hundreds of hiring and retention decisions.
The year-two question behind every UW salary figure
The 2026 salary story at the University of Washington will not be settled by the regents’ vote or the state appropriation. It will be settled in the distribution decisions made by deans and chairs, and in the gap between the Seattle campus and the regional campuses that remains visible in every database update. For prospective faculty, the practical question is not what the average university professor makes. It is what an offer in a specific department, on a specific campus, in a specific year will do to the life attached to the salary, and whether the public figure finally reflects the work being asked.