The University of Texas System Board of Regents has approved a 37% pay increase for Taylor Eighmy, president of the newly-merged UT San Antonio making him now among the highest-paid leaders in the system.
“Your annual salary was $735,316. With a well-deserved 37% increase effective September 1, 2025, your FY 2026 salary will now be $1,014,845, payable in monthly installments,” states a letter sent by the Office of the UT Chancellor John M. Zerwas to Eighmy in September. “You will continue to be eligible for annual increases in salary, upon the recommendation of the Chancellor to the Board of Regents.”
The letter was released during a regular board meeting in which the chancellor recommended approval of the pay raise. The board approved the increase and an agreement that states that once Eighmy’s appointment as president ends, he will continue to hold an appointment of tenured professor in the College of Engineering.
On Nov. 20, the regents approved the recommendation without much discussion. The same day they approved a compensation agreement of $1.25 million for UT Austin President James E. Davis.
Both Eighmy and Davis now make more than the recently appointed UT System Chancellor John M. Zerwas, whose agreement calls for an annual salary of $975,000.
Eighmy became president of UT San Antonio in 2017, and by the fall of 2024, he was tasked by the board with overseeing the long-awaited merger of UT San Antonio with UT Health Science Center at San Antonio, which was formalized this fall.
Eighmy went from leading a university with close to 36,000 students across five campuses, to overseeing about 42,500 students and 17,000 faculty members and staff across six campuses.
The addition of the Health Science Center includes the Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long School of Medicine, a School of Nursing, a School of Dentistry, a Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, a School of Health Professions and a School of Public Health.
“We’ve combined two distinguished Tier One institutions to form a new world-class university that champions social mobility, improves health and powers discovery to amplify our collective strengths and create impact at scale,” Eighmy said in a statement in September.
Shortly after the merger took effect, UT San Antonio officials announced yet another milestone reached with the culmination of Be Bold: A Campaign for Our Future. This was the university’s largest fundraising campaign yet, which yielded $575 million.
The campaign funded 139 endowed scholarships and fellowships for students, more than $40 million for faculty support, including 20 faculty positions, $225 million for research programs and supported 31 improvement projects.
“We are standing on a true inflection point towards greatness and thanks to each and every one of you I know that if we keep this trajectory, we are going to get there,” Eighmy said at the campaign celebration in October.
During an interview in September, Eighmy said him and Dr. Fransisco Cigarroa, senior executive vice president for health affairs and health system, have signaled they are here to stay.
“You might have heard Dr. Cigarroa and I talk at the board meeting about how we’ll be doing these jobs for the next 50 years,” Eighmy said. “I have the best job in the world and he would say the same thing.”
The San Antonio Report partners with Open Campus on higher education coverage.