UC coaches are California’s highest paid public employees. Who made the most?
The top-paid University of California employees who took home millions last year included a familiar cast of head coaches, doctors and leaders of health systems.
Justin Wilcox, UC Berkeley’s head football coach, earned the title of highest paid state employee last year, earning $4.7 million, according to the latest salary data. UCLA’s head basketball coach, Michael Cronin, came in second after earning $4.1 million in 2024.
Head football and basketball coaches at public universities are often the most well paid government employees across the country because those programs generate an enormous amount of revenue for the university system, said Roger Noll, a professor of economics emeritus at Stanford University.
For example, UC Berkeley and UCLA each took in more than $45 million in revenue from their football teams in 2023, according to the latest numbers from the U.S. Department of Education.
Wilcox and Cronin made substantially less than the previously highest-paid coach. UCLA paid its former football coach, Chip Kelly, $7.1 million in 2023. Kelly is currently the offensive coordinator for the Las Vegas Raiders.
(You can search all state employees salaries by using The Bee’s state pay database, which has been updated with 2024 University of California salaries.)
Competition drives high salaries
The UC system is competing with other universities and entities, such as the National Football League, to hire coaches, said Noll. Offering lucrative salaries attracts coaches who will ideally lead to winning teams.
So far, Cal’s football team has won 4 games and lost 2 under Wilcox this year. Cronin’s basketball team finished its most recent season with a record of 23 wins and 11 loses.
“They’re doing it because it generates a lot of money,” Noll said. “The behavior of a non-profit or government entity engaged in an entertainment like college sports, is not going to behave any differently in a professional for-profit company.”
Noll said universities do the same bidding when hiring professors, they’re just not as lucrative as quarterbacks and their coaches. Someone who runs a big lab might generate a couple of millions of dollars a year, he said, but a physics professor, for example, doesn’t generate a $100 million a year.
The highest-paid coaches make many more times the salaries of even the most decorated professors. The UC Berkeley chemistry professor Omar Yaghi, who was one of five UC faculty or alumni who won a Nobel Prize this month, earned $690,298 in total compensation in 2024. Yaghi, who was part of the team that won the prestigious award in chemistry, helped UC set a new record for the most number of Nobel Prizes won by an institution’s faculty in a single year.
While Kelly was a UC employee, the amount of money the UC system paid its highest-paid coaches grew between 2018 and 2024. Despite stepping down in February 2024, Kelly was still the fifth highest paid UC coach last year.
UCLA fired Kelly’s replacement, DeShaun Foster, last month after the team had three consecutive losses. The university is expected to pay Foster at least $6.4 million to buy him out of his contract, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Foster’s total compensation package last year was $2.7 million. Mark Madsen, Cal’s head basketball coach, was the fourth highest paid coach last year, earning $2.5 million.
Other top earners
Doctors and presidents of university-affiliated health centers are also much more well compensated than the chancellors that oversee the UC system.
Dr. Jesse Mills, a urologist who serves as the Director of the Men’s Clinic at UCLA, took home $4 million last year, the vast majority of which came in the form of “other pay,” a catch-all term for compensation whose source varies depending on what type of work the university employee does.
Mills and other well-compensated physicians working for the state earned the majority of their millions from additional pay earned from their clinic work, which is funded through patients and insurance companies.
Of the 13 UC employees who earned over $2 million in total compensation last year, seven were physicians who worked for various UC health systems.
Other top earners were Johnese Spisso, the President of the UCLA Health System, and Suresh Gunasekaran, the president and CEO of UCSF Health, who each earned $2.4 million last year.
Heather Harper, a spokesperson for the UC Office of the President, said that the university system’s compensation plans are designed to be competitive to attract top talent from across the country.
Some professionals working in certain competitive fields are eligible for additional compensation, which are primarily funded through specific revenue streams that are not part of the state’s general funds that support the university, Harper said.
In the case of athletics, that funding often comes from sponsors, boosters, ticket sales and media revenue.
Compensation can also come in the form of performance-based bonuses. In 2023, UCLA paid Kelly $1.1 million as part of an incentive payment that was part of his negotiated contract.
This story was originally published October 29, 2025 at 4:55 AM.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated UC Berkeley chemistry professor Omar Yaghi’s total compensation package.
