Looking at Virginia's Highest-Paid State Workers in 2022
The Virginia state employee salary reports for fiscal year 2022 came out, and as usual, people got excited about who made the most money. The top earners were mostly hospital directors, university presidents, and senior IT folks at agencies like DMV and VDOT. If you want to dig into this yourself, you don't need a paid subscription. The data is public, though finding it takes some patience. The Commonwealth of Virginia publishes individual employee compensation data through the Department of Planning and Budget. For FY2022, which runs July 2021 through June 2022, the top ten list was dominated by healthcare and higher education. The number one spot went to the president of Virginia Commonwealth University at around $1.4 million in total compensation. At the other end of the state system, the median state employee was making somewhere in the $50,000 to $70,000 range, so the spread at the top is wild. I pulled this data a few times over the years, and the biggest headache is that the datasets are messy. The raw files from the state come as separate spreadsheets for base salary, overtime, benefits, and retirement contributions. You have to join them yourself using SSN or employee ID, and not every row matches cleanly. Here's what I learned: the employee IDs are the reliable join key. The names and SSNs have formatting inconsistencies across agencies. I built a quick Python script that reads each agency's file, normalizes the employee ID field, and merges on that. Cut my processing time from about two hours down to roughly ten minutes.
The actual top earners in 2022 looked something like this when you put it together: Number one was the VCUMC system CEO / university president cluster, pulling over a million dollars when you include deferred compensation and retirement contributions. Then you had the Secretary of Health and Human Resources at around $800,000. Several hospital system CEOs across the state fell in the $600K to $900K range. The Chief Information Officer for the Commonwealth came in high because state IT leadership carries significant pay. Below that, you see VDOT commissioners and DMV executives clustering around $400K to $500K total compensation. One thing people miss when they look at these numbers is what counts as compensation. Base salary is just the starting line. Total compensation includes the employer contribution to retirement, health insurance premiums paid by the state, deferred compensation from 457 or 403(b) plans, and sometimes longevity pay or supervisory differentials. A manager making $120,000 in base salary might show up at $155,000 in total comp. A C-level executive at $500,000 base could be pushing $1.2 million when you add everything in. The state reports both figures, and they tell very different stories.
Here's the counter-intuitive part that trips people up: a lot of the highest "salaries" in state government aren't actually drawn from the general fund. University system compensation, for example, comes from a mix of tuition, research grants, and auxiliary enterprises. Hospital system pay is tied to revenue operations. So when someone says a state employee made $900,000, it's worth checking where that money actually came from before you start writing editorials about taxpayer waste. Most of it wasn't taxpayers in the way people assume. Another nuance that gets overlooked is the difference between annual compensation and actual cash received. Deferred compensation deferses payout. Retirement contributions accrue but aren't liquid. If you're trying to compare a state worker's pay to a private sector salary, you're comparing apples to a completely different fruit basket. The state system is structured differently, with heavier benefits weighting and lower cash components than the private sector equivalent roles. If you want to find the data yourself, start at the Virginia Department of Planning and Budget website. They archive the individual employee salary datasets there. You'll also find the Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports which break things down by agency. Some people use the Virginia Freedom of Information Act to request supplemental data, but honestly, the published datasets cover most of what you need if you're willing to do the cleanup work.
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The limitations here are real. The data is self-reported by agencies, and the quality varies wildly. Some agencies format their files cleanly. Others drop rows, merge columns, or change field names between years, which makes year-over-year tracking annoying. There's also a lag. The FY2022 data didn't fully publish until well into 2023. If you're looking for real-time salary info, this isn't it. And the top-ten lists shift every year based on hiring, promotions, and whether certain positions were vacant. A vacant position doesn't generate a salary line item, so the rankings can jump around for reasons that have nothing to do with actual pay changes. For most people just curious about who made the most, the published summaries are fine. If you're doing actual analysis, expect to spend time on data cleaning. The insights are worth it, but the work isn't trivial. I've seen too many blog posts and news segments cite raw numbers without context, which is why I mention the comp structure stuff. The numbers themselves are public. Understanding what they actually mean takes a bit more effort.
