By Rachel Monroe, compensation researcher and labor journalist with 12 years covering higher education, wage transparency, and workplace data
Last reviewed: July 19, 2026
Johns Hopkins University reported $28.6 million in internal-equity and market-related salary increases for more than 6,500 staff between 2019 and 2022. Nearly two-thirds of that spending, $18.2 million, occurred in 2022, when labor-market pressure and salary compression had become harder for the university to ignore.
myJH is the institutional portal through which employees may reach payroll, HR, and workplace systems. It does not establish salary equity; that work is described in the university’s “JHU Report on Staff Pay Equity,” published in April 2024.
What Johns Hopkins means by pay equity
Johns Hopkins defines internal pay equity as comparing compensation among employees whose jobs are similar in position, title, experience, scope, and complexity. The report distinguishes that from market-based pay, which compares university salaries with external labor markets and higher-education peers.
Those are related questions, but they are not identical.
An employee can be paid consistently with close coworkers while the entire job family sits below the external market. The reverse can also occur: a salary may look competitive against outside benchmarks while an internal gap remains between employees performing comparable work.
The university says its reviews consider:
- years of relevant experience;
- position scope and areas of oversight;
- supervisory, budget, or operational responsibility;
- job complexity;
- specialized technical requirements;
- geographic location;
- external salary benchmarks where available.
That list explains why a single job title does not always produce a single salary.
It also creates room for judgment.
The $28.6 million adjustment program
The university’s published figures show a sharp increase in equity and market-adjustment spending over four calendar years.
| Calendar year | JHU equity and market adjustments |
|---|---|
| 2019 | $3.3 million |
| 2020 | $1.5 million |
| 2021 | $5.6 million |
| 2022 | $18.2 million |
| 2019–2022 total | $28.6 million |
Source: “The JHU Report on Staff Pay Equity,” April 2024.
The 2022 amount was more than three times the 2021 figure and more than five times the 2019 figure. Johns Hopkins describes the overall rise between 2019 and 2022 as nearly 300%, although that percentage refers to the change in annual adjustment spending rather than an across-the-board salary increase for the workforce.
That distinction is critical.
The university did not give every employee a 300% larger raise. It increased the total pool directed toward selected equity and market corrections.
More than 6,500 staff members received adjustments over the four-year period. The report includes full-time, part-time, casual or limited, and senior staff in the adjustment tables, while excluding bargaining-unit and nonclassified employees. Faculty and executive leadership are also outside the main staff analysis.
The program was broad. It was not universal.
Why 2022 became the outlier
Johns Hopkins links the 2022 spike to the labor-market disruption that followed the pandemic.
The report says salaries and inflation shifted significantly after 2020, creating tension between existing employee pay and the amount required to recruit or retain workers. Human Resources responded by increasing salary-adjustment activity and using external market data more heavily.
The university says its compensation team participates in more than 25 external salary surveys each year. Named sources include the Ivy Plus Compensation Survey, EduComp Compensation Survey, Mercer Benchmark Database, Payscale Compensation Survey, Allied Health Staff Compensation Survey, and a specialized development-position survey.
That is a more detailed benchmarking process than a simple comparison with public salary websites.
Yet the underlying survey results are not published in the report. Readers can see which benchmarking products were used, but not the precise market percentile Johns Hopkins targeted for each job family.
This limits independent verification.
The institution’s analysis may be methodical, while outsiders still cannot reproduce every compensation decision from the public document.
More than 2,000 reviews occur annually
Johns Hopkins reports that Human Resources conducts more than 2,000 reviews of pay equity and job level each year for university staff. Those reviews can lead to reclassification, an in-range salary change, or a market or internal-equity adjustment.
A reclassification is not the only possible outcome.
When duties have expanded enough, an employee may move to another position level and receive a related salary increase. When the job has changed but not enough to justify a promotion, the university says an in-range adjustment may be considered instead.
This is one of the report’s more useful details because it explains why compensation changes may appear without a new title.
It also explains why an employee doing materially different work can remain in the same broad salary structure while receiving a correction.
The report does not publish:
- how many reviews produced no change;
- how long reviews took;
- how often managers initiated them;
- how many employees requested review themselves;
- the median dollar adjustment;
- the share of cases resulting in promotion rather than an in-range increase.
More than 2,000 reviews sounds substantial. Without outcome data for the full review pool, it cannot establish that most concerns were corrected.
Salary changes by job category
Johns Hopkins organizes its staff data using Equal Employment Opportunity Commission job categories. These broad categories group together many individual titles.
The April 2024 report shows the following median salaries in 2019 and 2022:
| EEO job category | 2019 median | 2022 median | Published change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Managerial | $96,000 | $103,000 | $7,000 |
| Professional | $70,000 | $75,000 | $5,000 |
| Technical/Paraprofessional | $39,000 | $42,000 | $3,000 |
| Administrative Support | $41,000 | $45,000 | $4,000 |
| Skilled Crafts | $59,000 | $76,000 | $17,000 |
| Service | $68,000 | $68,000 | $0 |
Source: Figure 3, “The JHU Report on Staff Pay Equity,” April 2024.
The largest dollar movement shown was in Skilled Crafts, where the median rose from $59,000 to $76,000. Administrative Support increased from $41,000 to $45,000, while the Service median remained at $68,000 in both comparison years.
Those figures should not be read as raises received by a fixed group of identical workers.
Median salary can change because existing workers receive increases, higher-paid employees enter, lower-paid employees leave, jobs are reclassified, or the composition of a category shifts. Several of those effects may occur at once.
The report attributes the change to the full set of compensation initiatives, but the chart alone cannot isolate the contribution of equity adjustments from merit increases, hiring changes, promotions, or workforce turnover.
The number is real. The cause is mixed.
Where adjustment percentages mislead
Figure 2 shows average percentage increases among employees who actually received equity or market adjustments. It does not show average raises for everyone in each occupational category.
For example, the 2022 chart reports:
- 5% for 519 managerial employees;
- 7% for 2,092 professional employees;
- 6% for 415 technical or paraprofessional employees;
- 6% for 883 administrative-support employees;
- 7% for 10 nonunion skilled-crafts employees;
- 8% for 10 nonunion service employees.
The Professional category dominated the 2022 count, with 2,092 recipients, far more than any other group shown.
A headline saying “Johns Hopkins gave professional staff a 7% raise” would be inaccurate. The correct statement is that professional staff who received an equity or market adjustment in 2022 averaged a 7% increase under this dataset.
Employees who received no such adjustment are not represented in that percentage.
Small groups require extra caution. The 2022 Skilled Crafts and Service percentages each rested on only 10 employees in the nonunion data. A percentage based on 10 recipients has a different analytical weight from one based on more than 2,000.
What the report says about gender and race
The report states that Johns Hopkins conducted an internal analysis in 2022 examining differences in full-time-equivalent annual salary by gender, race, and ethnicity after accounting for job differences, years at JHU, and years of related experience. The university says resulting adjustments produced pay equity across those measured groups.
That is the institution’s conclusion.
The public report does not provide regression coefficients, unexplained pay-gap percentages, confidence intervals, sample counts by demographic group, or the exact model specification. It therefore cannot be independently evaluated at the same level as a full academic or regulatory pay-equity study.
The report does include workforce representation figures from an earlier staff-composition analysis. In 2021, women represented 69% of managerial staff and 70% of professional staff. Representation among employees identifying as Black or African American, Hispanic, Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, Asian, or American Indian increased from 24% to 28% in managerial roles and from 32% to 36% in professional roles between 2017 and 2021.
Representation and pay equity are connected but distinct.
A group can achieve comparable pay within the same roles while remaining underrepresented in the highest-paid categories. Johns Hopkins itself notes that managerial and professional categories tend to pay more, making workforce distribution across those categories part of the compensation picture.
Degree requirements and access to higher-paid work
The report links compensation equity to job qualifications.
Johns Hopkins says it has been removing degree requirements from staff positions where a degree is not operationally or academically necessary. A position that once required a bachelor’s degree may accept four years of relevant experience instead, while advanced degrees may be listed as preferred rather than mandatory where possible.
This affects pay equity indirectly.
Formal degree requirements can block experienced employees from competing for professional or managerial work even when they possess the relevant skills. Since those categories carry higher median salaries, broader qualification rules may influence who can reach the better-paid portions of the workforce.
The policy is not universal. Johns Hopkins preserves degree requirements where the institution considers them necessary.
Nor does substituting experience guarantee selection, promotion, or higher pay. It expands eligibility.
That is a narrower but measurable change.
Pay transparency in job postings
Johns Hopkins says all new staff postings include a hiring range and targeted salary. The report also states that candidates are not asked to disclose salary history and that offers above a salary-range midpoint require central Compensation review.
The university connects these practices to Maryland’s Equal Pay for Equal Work Act.
Publishing a hiring range can reduce information imbalance, but a wide range does not tell an applicant exactly where an offer will land. The targeted salary is often more informative because it identifies the institution’s expected hiring point rather than the full theoretical span.
Central review above the midpoint serves another purpose. It can limit unusually high offers that create internal compression or inequity with existing staff.
It can also constrain departments trying to recruit scarce talent.
The tradeoff is visible: market pressure pushes offers upward, while internal equity discourages paying a newcomer far more than experienced employees in comparable roles.
How Johns Hopkins compares with its peers
The university says pay-equity details from peer institutions are not public, preventing it from determining whether comparable adjustment programs are common across universities.
That is an unusually direct data limitation.
Higher-education employers commonly publish salary ranges, annual financial statements, faculty compensation data, or aggregate workforce demographics. Far fewer publish the cost and recipient count of internal staff-equity adjustments.
Johns Hopkins provides more detail than a generic claim of “regular market reviews.” It discloses the four-year dollar total, annual spending, recipient totals, category medians, and adjustment percentages for selected workers.
The report is less transparent about the statistical analysis behind its conclusion that measured demographic pay equity was achieved.
Both observations can be true.
Workforce scale changes the interpretation
A 2025 economic-impact analysis described Johns Hopkins’ combined workforce as exceeding 70,000 employees and called it Maryland’s largest private employer. The same analysis attributed a $40 billion annual economic impact in Maryland to Johns Hopkins operations and related activity.
The workforce figure covers the wider Johns Hopkins university and health-system enterprise, while the 2024 pay-equity report focuses on specified JHU staff categories and excludes faculty, executives, bargaining-unit staff, and other groups.
The denominators do not match.
It would be misleading to divide 6,500 adjustment recipients by the 70,000-plus enterprise workforce and label the result a university-wide adjustment rate. The two sources define the covered population differently.
This is a recurring problem in Johns Hopkins employment reporting: university staff, health-system employees, faculty, student workers, international program employees, and affiliated organizations are often grouped together in general descriptions but separated in compensation documents.
Funding pressure complicates equity efforts
Reuters reported that Johns Hopkins University laid off 110 employees in June 2026, with administrative functions particularly affected, citing reductions in federal research funding.
That followed the elimination of more than 2,000 positions in 2025 after the loss of $800 million in USAID grants, including 247 U.S.-based positions and 1,975 jobs across 44 countries.
Funding contraction can create new equity pressure.
Remaining employees may absorb additional responsibilities. Vacancies may stay open longer. Departments may have less room for discretionary adjustments even while market rates continue moving. Grant-funded salaries may also face limits that centrally funded roles do not.
The April 2024 report predates those major reductions.
Its figures describe compensation actions through 2022, not the post-cut environment of 2025 and 2026. The university had anticipated publishing a subsequent report with data through 2024, but the 2024 document remains the specific public analysis reviewed here.
That date caveat is substantial.
Where the headline number misleads
The $28.6 million total is evidence of a significant compensation intervention. It does not prove that all inequities were eliminated permanently.
Pay relationships continue changing when employees are hired, promoted, transferred, reclassified, or lost to turnover. Market salaries shift. Funding sources tighten. Managers redistribute work.
Johns Hopkins acknowledges that compensation is dynamic and says it plans a university-wide staff compensation review every three years, alongside continuing salary-equity reviews.
The stronger conclusion is that the institution built a recurring review system and spent heavily on adjustments during a turbulent labor market.
The weaker conclusion, unsupported by the public data, is that every comparable Johns Hopkins employee now receives equal pay.
Frequently asked questions
Is myJH responsible for employee salaries?
No. It is an access portal.
How much did Johns Hopkins spend on pay-equity adjustments?
The university reported $28.6 million from 2019 through 2022 for more than 6,500 staff members.
How much was spent in 2022?
Johns Hopkins reported $18.2 million, nearly two-thirds of the four-year total.
Did every employee receive an adjustment?
No. The report covers employees selected for internal-equity or market-related corrections and excludes several worker categories from its analysis.
Which job category had the most 2022 recipients?
Professional staff, with 2,092 employees receiving an average 7% equity or market adjustment in the published data.
Did Johns Hopkins prove there was no gender or racial pay gap?
Johns Hopkins says its adjusted 2022 analysis resulted in equity across race, ethnicity, and gender after accounting for job and experience factors. The public report does not disclose enough statistical detail for an outside reader to reproduce that result.
Why did Skilled Crafts median pay rise so much?
The reported median moved from $59,000 in 2019 to $76,000 in 2022. The report does not isolate how much came from direct equity adjustments, workforce composition, promotions, market changes, or other salary activity.
The clearest reading is that Johns Hopkins made a large, documented correction effort, while the age and scope of the public dataset prevent it from serving as a definitive picture of pay equity in 2026.
