Pay, 2023 and after (in theory)

As you may be able to tell from the charts above, the conditions EECS graduate students were facing before 2023 were becoming increasingly less tenable. This is to say nothing of the struggles graduate students in other departments face; many of whom are given lower step-level GSR or GSI positions, if they're guaranteed appointments at all.

Because of these conditions, at the end of 2022, graduate student workers across the UC system all simultaneously went on strike, in what became the largest grad student strike in history. Basically, graduate students across the UCs all decided to stop working to force the university to negotiate with us for better pay. In particular, this was the first time graduate student researchers (GSRs) were part of union organizing activity.

Because of this historic act of graduate student labor solidarity, we were able to get the university to negotiate with us for some pretty substantial changes in how all grad students at the university are paid. Turns out, when you stop working? the university pays attention :^)

How much were the raises?

The result of this effort was a new contract that specifies new conditions of work for graduate students. There were a ton of wins for grad students, including better recourse for cases of harassment, as well as wins in health and childcare coverage. Of interest for us are three changes.

Step level changes

First: step levels changed to promote more equitable pay. Graduate students at the lower steps were criminally underpaid, as we discussed above. In response to this, the new contract reduces the number of steps from ten to six. The old step 4 is now the new lowest step level, step 1, and steps 9-10 became the new step 6. For EECS students, this means that old Step 9 is equivalent to new Step 6.

Raises

Second, we got big raises. For us in step 9, we received 11% in April 2023, then ~6.4% in both October 2023 and 2024. Folks in lower step levels, because of the changes in the step system, got even bigger gains: nearing 40% in April 2023! Here's the table from before with the old step levels included:

And as a result of these gains, we've received true gains in wages relative to inflation! Here is how our wages over time compare with inflation since 2013:

Below we show two charts: one showing cumulative increase of wages for a formerly-step 9, now step 6 GSR versus the cumulative increase of inflation, and another showing the difference between wage and inflation increase, again for a formerly-step 9, now step 6 GSR.

Compared to overall inflation since 2013, we've had around a 10% increase in purchasing power. For continuing students, this reprieve unfortunately came at the cost of having to bear huge effective wage losses during the strikes (which was the choice of the department to not provide any raises during this period!).

Appointment levels

Third, no more 48% appointments. By contract, the department is now required to pay us at appointment %s commensurate with the work we're doing. In other words: Full-time grad students should be paid 100%, and part-time grad students should be paid 50%. In theory, this should prevent the department from appointing junior graduate students at 48% and paying us less than other grad students.

So how much should I make now?

Here's a modified version of the previous calculator with updated info for the most recent round of raises:

Given the inputs above, this is how much folks in 2025 could expect to make for each month in the school year:

As before, we also show pay amounts for other step levels. Note that for 2023 and after, instead of 10 step levels, there are 6.

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 $65,033.25 in yearly salary.

For reference, Berkeley's minimum wage in 2025 was $19.58.

Note that many of the wage increases don't really reflect in yearly salaries until 2023, since the wage increases happen so late into the 2022-23 school year.

This is how much you should be making. However...