Tech Transfer Salaries: Comprehensive Data and Analysis – 2025 Edition

Table of Contents

We took a different approach to garner salaries for this report and cast a much wider net to deliver the most comprehensive technology transfer salary study ever published, including:

• 880 individual salaries
• 129 institutions
• Institutional data on research funding, portfolio size, office size, etc.
• Complete demographics such as education, prior work experience, position… the works
• Geographic factors such as cost-of-living adjustments

This report summarizes the key findings for compensation, helping our readers understand exactly what varying roles are paid, whether you are looking to hire more staff or advocating for staff or oneself. 

Description

Hiring and staff retention remains a critical factor in operating an efficient and successful technology transfer office (TTO). Accurate, unbiased, and transparent reporting of salaries has long been challenging data to garner. Yet this information is critical for everyone in the office, from institution leadership and TTO directors seeking to successfully bring aboard the best staff within budget, as well as for individual employees to understand their value in the job market.

We are proud to publish the 2025 Tech Transfer Salaries Report, an analysis of current documented salaries across TTOs in the US. The report provides current pay rates for a wide range of institutions and analyzes how personal, educational, geographic (e.g., cost-of-living), and other factors impact salaries. The results demonstrate how education can be a strong determinant of pay, including both degrees earned and where one attends college.

This report also takes a completely different approach to collecting and analyzing salaries relative to past studies in the technology transfer industry. In the US, salaries of public universities and specific types of non-profits, such as research foundations, are reported publicly. It is a slow, manual process to collect and verify the information across 100s of sources, but one that pays strong dividends in the end.

We undertook such a project starting in December 2024 and matched compensation data with personal information from professional social networking sites, university staff pages, and other public-facing sources. Salary data was obtained from a wide range of sources, including but not limited to:

• University websites
• State government websites
• Non-profit reporting organizations such as Pro Publica and Guidestar
• Newspapers
• Independent websites reporting pay like GovSalaries and Open Payrolls.

Multiple sources were sampled where possible to verify data at the same institution was reported consistently. The result is a comprehensive view of current salary information plus each employee’s education, career history, and demographic data.