Professor Posts at US Universities — Assistant, Associate and Full Professor Appointments

US universities and four-year colleges appoint faculty at three professorial ranks. In the United States these are rungs of an ordinary career rather than senior honours, which is why a department can hold twenty professors at once.

The ranks

• Assistant professor. The entry rank, normally probationary with a tenure review
• Associate professor. Usually granted with tenure, at the end of a probationary period of no more than seven years
• Professor. The senior rank, promoted on the record with no fixed clock

The contract

• Most appointments are nine-month contracts covering the autumn and spring semesters
• Summer salary comes from teaching a summer course or from external grant funding
• Workload is conventionally 40 per cent teaching, 40 per cent research and 20 per cent service at a research university
• Teaching load runs from two courses a semester at doctoral institutions to five at community colleges

Pay, on AAUP 2025–26 averages

• Professor $163,836, associate professor $113,427, assistant professor $97,232
• Lecturer $84,292, instructor $74,087, all ranks combined $119,836
• Collected from 768 institutions reporting on 359,234 full-time faculty

Before you accept

Get the written workload assignment and the tenure criteria before signing. Among full-time faculty, 50.7 per cent hold tenure and 31.4 per cent are in non-tenure-track appointments. Pay data is from the AAUP and the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, not by JobGader.