Calculating pre-2023 salaries

Putting this all together, we can look at how much you'd expect to make as a grad student (EECS and otherwise) over the course of a school year:

Given the inputs above, this is how much folks in could expect to make for each month in the school year:

And this is how much you could expect to make cumulatively over the course of the year. The red line represents pay at the current selected step level. For reference, we've also provided what pay amounts would look like if we were paid at other step levels, but with the same appointment level. If you hover over the chart, you can see cumulative values for each month for the current selected step level.

We can also calculate your effective hourly wage: how much you'd make hourly if you were working a regular job (i.e. 40 hours a week) and made in yearly salary.

For reference, Berkeley's minimum wage in 2021 was $16.32. Note that folks being paid at lower step levels would earn less than minimum wage during the year. And this is an optimistic calculation for them too! Folks in other departments aren't always given GSR appointments & don't always receive higher appointment levels.

Fellowships

Fellowships are a particularly complicated case, since every fellowship is slightly different and different fellowships can interact with each other in a bunch of different ways. We try to discuss in general how fellowships work, along with some more common specific examples.

In general, if you are paid by fellowship, this means you are funded by an outside source, either the university or somebody else. For the most part, this means instead of being paid in salary (i.e. monthly), you'll receive large lump sum stipends (normally at the start of each semester).

Fellowships tend to be prestigious things that look good for individuals and the university. Thus, to encourage students to pursue fellowships, the EECS department had a written policy of ensuring that students on fellowships are paid ~10% more than students without.

Taxes

The above wages are pre-tax; they don't include taxes taken away from your paycheck. Part of your paycheck is withheld from you to pay income tax and social security. Additionally, during tax season, you will have to pay part of your pay in federal and state taxes.

Taxes are complicated as hell and we can't afford to explain them all here, so we're presenting pre-tax figures. As a rule of thumb, you can expect 10-20% of your paycheck to go towards paying taxes.

Inflation

One other piece of information of note is that, as you can see from before, there has been a steady increase in wages from 2013 to 2021. For the most part, this results in ~3% yearly wage increases:

This might seem nice, but in practice we have inflation to contend with; prices increase over time! The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) publishes public information on inflation, so let's chart our wage increases compared to inflation over time. Here's some inflation data provided by the BLS for the San Francisco Bay Area region, both for overall inflation and for individual subcomponents (e.g. rent inflation):