Members voted to approve a salary increase for the Waterloo Undergraduate Student Association (WUSA) officers, including the president, vice president of stakeholder relations and vice president of student experience.

The president and vice presidents’ annual compensation will now be $66,282.50, a 9.5 per cent increase from the president’s compensation last year. 

The final vote, decided in an annual members meeting on March 25, passed with 45 yes votes (48.9 per cent), 33 no votes (33.87 per cent) and 14 abstentions (15.21 per cent). An amendment was brought forward by 2025-2026 director and former vice president, Arya Razmjoo, to raise the student per term increase by 10 cents (from $0.21 to $0.31). This amendment passed with 33 members voting yes, 28 voting no, and 10 abstaining. 

“Current pay, which is around $60,000 a year, does not actually reflect the workload and expectations of the role,” said 2025-2026 director Skylar Duggan when introducing the motion. “These are full-time, quite high responsibility positions, and they’re not just part-time student jobs as many of us believe.”

He added that this was intended to maintain the quality and accessibility of these roles. The board of directors had previously discussed changes in compensation in relation to the commitment required of these positions.

“We went on for a while about current co-op pay and whether or not that even matches what the full-time salary would be for the officers,” Duggan said. “If compensation doesn’t reflect these demands – so the increased cost of living – we risk limiting who can realistically take on these positions, really reducing the competitiveness – you might not want to run if you can just make more as a coop student.”

Incoming director Jacob Lewis pointed out that this past WUSA general election was not competitive: two of the three officer positions (president and vice president of stakeholder relations) had only one candidate in the running, and only two people ran for vice president of student experience.

Incumbent director Muhammad Abbas Kanji also questioned whether more should be implemented to accurately reflect the workload, given the fact that there are now two vice president roles (government stakeholder relations and student experience). 

“We’re making two separate changes right now – we’re adding more capacity by adding a new vice president role, and at the same time, we’re also increasing the pay with the assumption that workload is high,” Kanji said.

Kanji added that the formula that was used to calculate co-op rates skewed higher than average, noting that it was based on the top paid performing faculties (math and engineering), fifth year co-op rates, and U.S. co-op rates. 

At last year’s annual member’s meeting, members voted to allow the board to confer and establish a new pay based on officer workload.

The increase will come into effect at the start of the 2026-2027 governance year in May.