Most Texas government workers got no pay raise from 2009 to 2012

Pay raises for Texas government workers are extremely rare of late, an employee group maintains. “Most state employees did not receive any pay raise from 2009 to 2012,” the Texas State Employees Union says on a union web page.

The last across-the-board raises took effect in 2008. Otherwise, lawmakers gave most employees a one-time, one-month bonus of $800 each in 2009 and legislated consecutive raises for more than 34,000 other workers in 2009 and 2010.

We rated this claim as True, concluding that a bonus is not a raise and noting that research undertaken at our request by the Texas state comptroller’s office suggests that no more than 14 percent of workers across most state agencies got a merit raise any of the three cited years. Even if one assumes, perhaps improbably, that a completely different set of workers got each year’s merit raises, less than half of agency workers would have gotten those pay bumps.

Read our work to the right.