There is very little information available on how much postdocs are actually paid in the U.S., beyond data on institutional salary policies gathered by the National Postdoctoral Association. Following on from recent discussions about postdoc salaries changing as a result of proposed updates to U.S. Federal labor law, we have gathered data from a selection of institutions through Freedom of Information Requests, asking only for titles and salaries of postdocs, to see if we can identify actual postdoctoral salaries. The aggregate data, and more information, can be found at out “Investigating Postdoc Salaries” Resource. Every day, we will be releasing a discussion of each individual institution or system from which we received data. Today: University of Utah.

 

Cost for FOIA Request: $0

Additional notes: Request originally rejected; data sent in paper format after successful appeal to General Counsel.

 

University of Utah makes use of 6 postdoc titles; it was surprising to find that salaries of $0 were reported across all 6 titles. It might be expected that postdocs on paid-direct fellowships (which it would be assumed would represent the apparent salaries of “$0”, reflecting not annual salaries but instead what gets paid through the institution) would all be gathered under a subset of titles; it begs the question of why Utah has 6 titles, if there is no difference between them in terms of where salary is coming from, which this data suggests. Likewise, there are titles such as Post Doc Fellow Paid Direct with salaries that appear to be full salaries, suggesting either that the title is inappropriate, or that the way the data is reported is arbitrary.

 

The salary range of salaries above $23,660 runs from $23,660 to $91,936, a nearly four-fold difference within the institution.