Dear Colleagues,
This morning, Arbitrator Parmar issued an award resolving all outstanding salary and benefits disputes between UTFA and the University of Toronto Administration for the one-year term of July 1, 2026, to June 30, 2027.
Arbitrator Parmar ordered a 3% increase to base salary, salary floors; PTR increments and breakpoints; and per course/overload stipends, effective July 1, 2026.
Due to UTFA’s insistence that the parties expedite the bargaining process, and unlike prior years, there will be no delay in getting you your salary increases. This salary increase will be reflected in your pay beginning with July’s first pay period.
In reaching this award, Arbitrator Parmar reaffirmed the core principles that increases to salary at the University of Toronto must keep pace with and exceed inflation and must keep salaries at the University of Toronto at top of market. She awarded a salary increase that was higher than current rates of inflation at the time of the hearing and matched across-the-board increases at UBC for the same period:
I find that this increase is appropriate because it serves the dual purpose of accounting for “prior year” inflation, which is historically a particularly significant consideration for these parties in arriving at ATB increases, and keeping the University at “top of market”.
Arbitrator Parmar soundly rejected the Administration’s proposal for a salary increase of 1.5%. As UTFA argued, this proposal fell far below current levels of inflation and would have represented a significant salary cut for UTFA members in terms of real wages.
Arbitrator Parmar also rejected the Administration’s submissions that she should not consider salaries at comparators identified by UTFA, namely UBC. To the contrary, she stated that salaries at UBC are “particularly relevant”. For context, UBC negotiated 3% increases for a four-year term, until 2029, which means that salary increases at the University of Toronto should not fall below 3% for any of the next three years.
With respect to your benefits, Arbitrator Parmar awarded three improvements:
-
Child Care Benefit: to be increased to $1,250,000 per year (up from $1,000,000).
-
Hearing aids: to be increased to $2,000 for one left hearing aid and $2,000 for one right hearing aid, up to $4,000 every 36 months (up from $1,000 per ear).
-
Vision: to be increased to $775 every 24 months (up from $725).
The changes ordered by Arbitrator Parmar are in addition to the key improvements UTFA achieved in bargaining.
First, UTFA achieved a significant overhaul of salary floors for faculty and librarians.
Moving forward, the salary floor for all faculty is $113,300 (including July 1, 2026 ATB). These floors will increase each year with the across-the-board increase. This means that no full-time faculty member, regardless of status or stream, will be paid less than $113,300. This brings salary floors up from as low as $64,922.
For librarians, the new floors (including July 1, 2026 ATB) will be the following;
Librarian I: $88,786 (up from $83,080)
Librarian II: $92,906 (up from $86,687)
Librarian III: $114,268 (up from $110,940)
Librarian IV: $134,635 (up from $130,714)
Second, UTFA negotiated several other improvements to your working conditions, including the removal of barriers to adjudicating workload issues and changes to the administration of the 5% Special Merit Pool for PTR.
Significantly, the compensation for the first Research & Study Leave following a successful review of continuing appointment will be increased to 90% (from 87.5%), effective July 1, 2026. This achieves equity for part-time faculty with their full-time colleagues.
UTFA believes in achieving improvements to our working conditions through collaboration and collegiality whenever possible. The Administration’s approach in this round, unfortunately, was sharply adversarial.
As noted in our prior message, the senior Administration took positions in arbitration that were both offensive and counterfactual. In particular, it devalued the contributions of all faculty to the academic mission of the University, while it sought to pit groups of members against one another. It also manipulated and withheld data in a way that made it extremely difficult to engage in any rational comparison between salaries at the University of Toronto and other universities.
As always, we welcome your feedback (via faculty@utfa.org).
Sincerely,
Terezia Zorić
UTFA President
Jun Nogami
UTFA Vice-President, Salary, Benefits, Pensions & Workload