When she signed Massachusetts’ $61 billion state budget, Governor Maura Healey touted taking several cost-saving steps amid “tight and uncertain” times, including halting a planned January pay hike for executive branch managers.
“[We] must all do our part to live within our means,” she told lawmakers in a letter this month.
Left unsaid at the time: Healey is giving those same managers — 3,600 in total — a separate raise this month, a 2 percent increase her administration estimates will cost roughly $10 million this fiscal year.
Members of Healey’s Cabinet, most of whom were making more than $202,000 a year, are also eligible for the increase, which would boost their pay by more than $4,000 apiece. The raise would mark the second time in six months Healey has given administration managers and Cabinet members a salary bump.
The raise for managers, like the one they received earlier this year, mirrors one that unionized employees in the executive branch are receiving under their collective bargaining agreements. Healey’s budget office said the move to link pay bumps for non-union managers with those included in union contracts is “consistent with common practice,” and together, the raises represent a “modest cost-of-living adjustment for all state employees.”
The average pay last year for full-time employees across state government, including base salaries and overtime, was $84,579, according to CTHRU, the state’s open records platform.
The increases for managers land at a time when Healey and lawmakers alike are preaching fiscal prudence. They’ve warned that federal funding cuts and a stormy economic picture could undercut the state’s spending plans. State officials also said a sweeping tax law President Trump signed could cost the state billions in health care funding.
Such risks have prompted proactive belt-tightening. State lawmakers, as part of negotiations over the annual budget, set aside hundreds of millions of dollars in unspent cash to cushion a possible future fiscal blow.
Healey and leaders in the Massachusetts House have also frozen hiring for positions under them. In addition, the governor said she is holding back $125 million in local earmarks that lawmakers passed until at least October, as she waits to see how the state’s financial picture develops.
There are other pressures, too. Bar advocates, private attorneys who represent indigent clients, are also pressing for the state to hike the rates they’re paid, as many refuse to take on new cases, crippling the state’s courts and prompting the dismissal of more than 100 criminal cases.
In Massachusetts, bar advocates in district court make $65 an hour — much less than the equivalent in many surrounding states — and attorneys leading the work stoppage are seeking a $35-an-hour raise. That, lawmakers estimate, would cost the state $100 million.
That executive branch managers are getting raises now — but not early next year under Healey’s order stopping them — was a matter of timing, Healey aides said.
Healey signed the state budget on July 4, but given the managers’ raises “were set to go into effect in July, it was too late in the cycle to stop them,” Matt Murphy, a spokesperson for Healey’s budget office, said in an email.
Murphy pointed to Healey’s other efforts to pare spending, including halting the January raises, which officials said would save $17 million. That number, however, included the savings the state would realize over the life of the collective bargaining agreements, which carry into fiscal year 2027, Murphy said.
“Governor Healey used her executive authority in other ways to save taxpayer dollars,” Murphy said.
Healey has linked raises for executives in her administration with those of unionized employees before. In late 2023 and early 2024, she gave members of her Cabinet a nearly $15,000 pay increase, mirroring a pair of 4 percent raises that union employees in the executive branch received through collective bargaining agreements.
Cabinet members and other managers also got a separate pay increase six months ago, when unionized employees got a 2 or 3 percent raise as stipulated by the contracts they negotiated with state officials.
With this month’s increase, Healey’s Cabinet members’ annual salaries would reach $206,496. That’s nearly $25,000 more than the $181,722 most of her Cabinet members made at the start of Healey’s administration in 2023.
Many of the state’s top elected officials also got raises to start the year under a complicated biennial process that automatically adjusts the pay of lawmakers and several statewide leaders.
Healey now makes an annual salary of $243,493, and her total compensation tops $300,000 when including an annual housing stipend. The House and Senate’s top Democrats each take home more than $224,000 in salary and other stipends.
Lawmakers and members of their staff are not affected by the raises Healey is giving members of her administration this month. But it remains to be seen if other pay raises could be in the works on Beacon Hill.
Several top officials in the Massachusetts Senate — including the chamber’s chief financial officer, its director of operations, and Senate President Karen Spilka’s chief of staff — filed ethics disclosures last month noting that as part of their duties, they review “potential adjustments” to the Senate’s pay structure, which could also affect them.
Sarah Blodgett, a spokesperson for Spilka’s office, did not directly answer whether a pay raise is coming for Senate staff. She said the officials submitted the disclosures in case any changes to staff pay “were needed,” noting the Senate hasn’t adjusted salaries since spring 2024.
Asked if the Senate has plans to increase salaries this fiscal year, Blodgett said, “That review is ongoing.”
Aides to House Speaker Ron Mariano said Monday that House officials have no immediate plans for broad-based pay increases in their chamber.
Matt Stout can be reached at matt.stout@globe.com. Follow him @mattpstout.