According to the data in front of me, the highest salary of the 41,100 state employees in Indiana in 2025 was close to $453,000. A figure like that pulls the state employees’ average wage up to $64,500. The median was $58,600.
And there we have it again. The average sits higher than the median because the folks higher up in an organization make more than made by the guy or gal in the middle of the pack.
I’m not saying the wages of state workers are too high. That $453,000 is probably appropriate for the Psychiatric Medical Director, who may attend to the neuroses and psychoses of the General Assembly’s members.
As you recall, the median is the sum paid to that employee who gets paid right in the middle of all the state’s workers. It is a measure related directly to people, not a purely statistical device realized by adding up the salaries of all workers and dividing by the number of workers.
Think of it the Hoosier way. A basketball team has five players. One of them is 7 feet tall, the others are all 5 feet tall. The average height of the team is 5’ 5”. But when you go out on the court, the player guarding you is most likely to be 5 feet tall, because that is the median height of your opponents. In this case, you have an 80% chance of being guarded by a player 5 feet tall.
Now convert that basketball team to a small company. The Boss makes a million dollars a year and the four employees make $50,000 each. The average wage is $240,000 a year, but the median wage is $50,000. Wow! The average is 4.8 times greater than the median. Yet our Governor and our economic development boosters keep talking about the average wages of new jobs. Why can’t they give us that median wage?
The Governor of Indiana, Mike Braun, makes (or made) $220,418 per year (depending on what the Legislature did in its latest session). Mary Braun (probably no relation), in FSSA (the Indiana Family & Social Services Administration) makes (or made) $40,995. I don’t know how to compare the value of each job, but the Governor’s pay is 5.4 times Mary’s.
In the Bremen Public School Corporation (Marshall County), James White, Superintendent, got $89,492.84, just over $1,000 more than Jeffrey Unsicker, Director of Buildings and Grounds. That seems right since both are in charge of cleaning up the mess made by teachers, students, and insufficient funding.
Meanwhile, the K-8 principal at Walkerton and the High School principal at Bremen were the only employees to break $100,000 for the 2025 school year. Perhaps being closer to the teachers and students makes your job more valuable. Or is seniority the issue here?
In this wandering through pay levels, I did find one really funny joke: Indiana’s law IC 4-30-5-3 requires “the director shall operate the lottery to maximize revenues in a manner consistent with the dignity of the state and the welfare of its citizens.” Tell your friends that one!