UT San Antonio President Taylor Eighmy received a salary increase of 37%, amounting to $1,264,875. The University of Texas System Board of Regents voted to give Eighmy the highest salary bonus of the UT System’s academic institutional presidents, placing Eighmy among the highest paid presidents in the UT System and in the San Antonio area as well.
Eighmy was voted to become president of UT San Antonio in 2017, and in 2020, the board assigned him to oversee the successful merger between UT San Antonio and UT Health Science Center at San Antonio.
On Nov. 20 of 2025, the board approved the salary increase after UT System Chancellor John M. Zerwas recommended the 37% bonus. Eighmy’s newly derived $1.2 million salary surpasses Zerwas’s $975,000 salary, allowing him to join University of Texas at Austin President James E. Davis in earning more than the members of the board of regents. As for the rest of the board members, Eighmy’s new salary outpaces them with an estimated difference between $400,000 to over $1 million in salary. The salary increase occurs after Eighmy was named president of UT San Antonio and UT Health San Antonio following last year’s merger on Aug. 20.
In a letter to Eighmy, Zerwas congratulated him on his raise from $735,316 to $1.2 million. Zerwas described it as a “well deserved 37% increase.”
The celebratory letter Zerwas wrote notes that Eighmy will still be eligible for annual salary increases at the discretion of the chancellor and board. Eighmy’s position as president of UT San Antonio is served without any fixed terms, so his time in office is reviewed annually by the board of regents.
Furthermore, Eighmy’s salary for 2026 places him at a higher yearly rate than any UT System academic institutional presidents, with the exception of Davis, as outlined in the Aug. 21, 2025, meeting for the board of regents. However, the Legislative Budget Board’s 2026 Administrative Accountability Report finds that both university presidents’ earnings are roughly similar. The report finds that Eighmy will earn $1.26 million and Davis will make $1.25 million, a $50 million difference from what the UT System’s August meeting displayed for Davis. Eighmy’s salary places him among the top earners to be president of a public or private university in Texas, with the salary raise outsizing all of his UT System presidential counterparts.
In addition to the salary increase, Zerwas explains plans to transition Eighmy from a tenured president to a tenured professor in the College of Engineering at UT San Antonio, awarding him a yearly $100,000 research grant for two years. For Eigmy’s pay as a tenured professor, Zerwas wrote, the president will earn a salary “equal [to] the average academic rate of the three then-most highly compensated, full-time, tenured faculty members.”
In addition to leading the merger with UT Health San Antonio, Eighmy has facilitated the downtown expansion and pushed for the Be Bold Campaign — an initiative to expand research, scholarship and faculty base, raising over $500 million. Under Eighmy’s leadership, UT San Antonio has bolstered its research base, spending $168 million on research, and has increased its endowment to $315 million in 2024 alone, a $28 million increase from 2023.
Since his time as president of UT San Antonio, Eighmy went from overseeing 36,000 students and 1,556 faculty in 2017 to over 42,000 students and 17,000 faculty members in 2024.
