UMC Confirms Its CEO Is Paid "Slightly" Below Market, Where "Slightly" Is $200,000
The hospital's public statement and its own HR committee describe the same compensation gap using different vocabulary.
LAS VEGAS — Days after the Clark County Commission approved a raise and bonus for University Medical Center CEO Mason Van Houweling by a vote of 6–1, the hospital explained the decision to Fox5 Vegas: “According to an in-depth compensation survey, Van Houweling's total compensation, including benefits, falls slightly below the 25th percentile for hospital CEOs.” Six weeks earlier, UMC's own Chief Human Resources Officer had presented that survey to the hospital's HR & Executive Compensation Committee. His words, from the minutes: “The current salary for the UMC CEO is approximately $200K below the 25th percentile.”
The statement went on: “In 2025, the average UMC employee received a salary increase of 6.6 to 7.5 percent, depending on their individual performance. Van Houweling's salary increase of 7.1 percent remains firmly in line with the average for all UMC team members.” The board's minutes put the non-management increase at 6.6 percent. The CEO's 7.1 percent was worth $60,000 — more than 26 percent of what UMC's Chief Nursing Officer was paid in base salary in 2023. Submitted to a sentiment analyzer, the hospital's statement returns a compound score of +0.9147 and a negative score of exactly 0.000, which is the score a document receives when it contains no negative language at all. It was issued the week SEIU Local 1107 reported that as many as 100 UMC jobs were at risk.
On a base salary of $840,000.
Figure 1. The percentages are half a point apart. UMC cited the left panel. Sources: UMC HR & Executive Compensation Committee minutes, 2025-08-25 (non-management increase of 6.6%, comprising 2.6% COLA + 1.5% adjustment + 2.5% average merit; CEO merit increase “equal to $60K”). The non-management figure does not cover M-Plan participants.
Transparent Nevada calendar-year payroll disclosure, retrieved 2026-07-25. Breaks in the lines are years not published for that employee — 2017–2019 and 2022 — and are shown as gaps rather than interpolated.
Figure 2. Chief Executive Officer and Chief Nursing Officer, total compensation, 2016–2023. Base pay over that span rose 113% for the CEO and 36% for the CNO. In 2021 — the year his total crossed $1 million — her base pay fell $4,687. The ratio between the two lines widens in every year on record: 2.12× in 2016, 2.78× in 2020, 2.84× in 2021, 2.90× in 2023, a difference of $742,584. Both lines are hospital executives covered by the same management compensation plan — the Chief Nursing Officer was paid $391,029 in 2023. The gap widens anyway. Source: Transparent Nevada. Nominal dollars, not adjusted for inflation, as disclosed.
In January 2026, UMC became the first hospital in Nevada to earn Magnet recognition, a nursing-excellence designation whose published criteria include lower registered-nurse turnover and fewer vacancies.
Every figure on this page is sourced in
stories/umc-nevada/sources.md: Transparent Nevada payroll
disclosures, UMC Governing Board and committee minutes, and reporting by the
Las Vegas Review-Journal, the Nevada Independent, Fox5 Vegas, 8 News Now and
the Las Vegas Sun.