Inside the Texas Attorney General's Office: Child Support, Attorneys, and Who Does the Work

Two agencies in one — and a $71,000 pay gap between them

The Texas Office of the Attorney General is not a single coherent agency — it is two very different workforces sharing an agency code. On one side: 757 Assistant Attorneys General who average $126,713 a year, backed by law enforcement investigators, legal support staff, and managers. On the other: 1,604 child support officers and technicians who average $55,457 — less than half the attorneys' pay — and who make up the single largest job category in the agency at 39.6% of all employees.

The agency average salary of $80,851 obscures more than it reveals. The median is $67,893 — a $13,000 gap between mean and median — because the large, low-wage child support division is dragging the midpoint down while a comparatively small group of highly-paid attorneys and managers pulls the mean up.

The hidden workforce: 1,604 child support employees

You won't find the Texas OAG's child support division listed separately on most government websites — it operates under the Attorney General's umbrella and shows up in state payroll data as Agency 302. It is enormous: 1,604 employees, more than all attorneys, investigators, and managers at the agency combined.

The child support ladder runs from Technician I through Officer V, with salaries climbing from around $45,700 at the bottom to $69,476 at the senior officer level. Most of the workforce sits in the Officer II–IV range — the workhorses of the operation, handling caseloads across the state.

757 attorneys — and a $18,000 pay gap by ethnicity

The OAG employs 757 attorneys across seven grade levels, from Assistant Attorney General I through VII, plus Deputy Attorneys General, the First Assistant, and the Attorney General himself. Their average salary of $126,713 makes this the highest-paid major category in the agency. But pay within the attorney corps is not equal across ethnicities.

White attorneys average $131,033 — $18,250 more than Black attorneys at $112,783. Asian attorneys average $118,348, sitting between Hispanic and White. Whether this reflects grade-level distribution, years of experience, or other factors requires deeper analysis, but the gap is consistent and not trivial: $18,000 over a career represents a substantial difference in lifetime earnings and retirement savings.

3% of the workforce, split between law and IT

The OAG has 123 Asian employees — 3.0% of total staff. Unlike at the Texas Workforce Commission, where Asian employees are concentrated almost entirely in IT, here they split nearly evenly between legal and technology roles: 31 in the attorney corps (25.2%) and 31 in IT (25.2%). The remaining half are scattered across child support, finance, management, and other categories.

The most striking absence: Asian employees hold 16.8% of all IT positions (31 of 185) — more than five times their 3.0% share of overall staff — and 4.1% of attorney positions. But they hold only 1.5% of child support positions despite that division being nearly 40% of the agency. This mirrors the pattern seen at TWC: Asian state employees concentrate in professional and technical roles and are largely absent from frontline service delivery.

Hiring slowed sharply in 2020–2021 — likely the COVID effect — then rebounded strongly, hitting 19–20 new Asian employees per year in 2023–2024. Average tenure for Asian OAG employees is 7.3 years, compared to 9.2 years for the agency overall, consistent with the recent acceleration in hiring.

The agency's two salary tiers map almost perfectly onto ethnicity

Across the full OAG workforce, the salary gap between White and Asian employees on one end and Hispanic and Black employees on the other is not subtle. It is $25,000–26,000 — and the reason is structural. White and Asian employees are overrepresented in the attorney corps and IT; Hispanic and Black employees are overrepresented in child support.

Highest-paid Asian employees at the OAG

The ten highest-paid Asian employees span IT directors, senior attorneys, and managers — a mix that reflects the dual concentration of Asian staff in legal and technology roles. The top two earners are Directors earning more than $190,000.

What the data tells us about the OAG

The Office of the Attorney General is a study in occupational stratification. Nearly 40% of its workforce labors in child support — a division that is majority Hispanic and Black, majority female, and paid an average of $55,457. Meanwhile, the attorney corps and IT department — where White and Asian employees are concentrated — average more than double that.

For Asian employees specifically, the OAG presents a different picture than the Texas Workforce Commission. At TWC, Asian workers are the IT department. At the OAG, they are split between IT and law — holding 16.8% of technology jobs and 4.1% of attorney positions — and nearly absent from child support. Their average salary of $95,197 nearly matches the White average of $95,945, putting both groups well above the $80,851 agency mean.

Explore the full OAG dataset at guestworkervisas.com/tx_employees.php  ·  Compare with the Texas Workforce Commission report