Houston Symphony benefits too

University of Houston team wins global Google award, walks away with a techbounty

The University of Houston is winning again — this time, it's the 2011 Google Online Marketing Challenge global award.

UH graduate students Erin Blatzer, Lauren Davis, Carolina Thomas and Jeffrei Clifton, led by professor Steven Koch, worked together to create a Google AdWords campaign for the Houston Symphony. The team received the award at the Googleplex in Mountain View, Calif.

CultureMap spoke with the lucky ladies while they were still vacationing in the Bay Area. The four had just arrived back at their hotel, drenched from rain after a trip to Alcatraz, when we got the scoop on the Google challenge itself and the awards they received.

"Our team was the first team from America to ever win the global portion of the competition," Clifton said. "One of the awards we received was a seven day paid vacation to San Francisco."

The goal of the challenge was to create an effective, three-week long ad campaign that intuitively directed Internet traffic to the website of each team's choice.

Each submission was judged on two components: 1) Ad effectiveness, based on a Campaign Statistics algorithm developed by Google, and 2) the strength of pre- and post-campaign written reports.

The team wanted to work with a nonprofit because they knew that, if they placed in the NGO Impact Award, the organization itself would win as well. And it just so happened that the marketing department for the Houston Symphony was considering AdWords as an advertising outlet when the team approached them.

"About 4,500 teams competed from different universities around the world," Blatzer explained. "Our team won globally and we placed third in the non-profit category, so the Houston Symphony will receive $5,000."

"Our team was the first team from America to ever win the global portion of the competition," Clifton said. "One of the awards we received was a seven day paid vacation to San Francisco."

Included in that was a tour of the Google campus, introductions to the AdWords team, exclusive access to Google food and a notorious TGIF meeting, and a raid of the Google employees-only store. And MacBook Pro laptops all around.

Congratulations ladies!

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Stretching the budget

A $100,000 salary in 2026 goes further in Houston than it did last year

Photo by Leo Yao on Unsplash

$100,000 stretches a little further in 2026.

A 2026 income study has good news for big earners in Houston: A six-figure salary goes further than it did last year.

A Houston resident's $100,000 salary is worth $84,840 after taxes and adjusted for the local cost of living, according to the new financial analysis from SmartAsset. That's about $1,500 more than Houstonians were bringing home last year.

The 2026 take-home pay is about eight percent higher than it was in 2024, when the same salary had an adjusted value of $78,089.

SmartAsset used its paycheck calculator to apply federal, state and local taxes to an annual salary of $100,000 in 69 of the largest American cities. The figure was then adjusted for the local cost of living (which included average costs for housing, groceries, utilities, transportation, and miscellaneous goods and services). Cities were then ranked based on where a six-figure salary is worth the least after applicable taxes and cost of living adjustments.

Houston ranked No. 60 in the overall ranking of U.S. cities where $100,000 is worth the least. If the rankings were flipped and the cities were ranked based on where $100,000 goes the furthest, that places Houston in the No. 10 spot nationwide.

Manhattan, New York remains the No. 1 city where a six-figure salary is worth the least. A Manhattan resident's take-home pay is only worth $29,420 after taxes and adjusted for the cost of living, which is 3.10 percent lower than it was in 2025.

SmartAsset determined Manhattan has a 29.7 percent effective tax rate on six-figure salaries. Meanwhile, the effective tax rate on a $100,000 salary in Texas (based on the eight cities examined in the report) is 21.1 percent. It's worth highlighting that New York implements a statewide graduated-rate income tax from 4-10.90 percent, whereas Texas is one of only eight states that don't tax residents' income.

Oklahoma City, No. 69, is the U.S. city in the report where a $100,000 salary stretches the furthest. A six-figure salary is worth $91,868 in 2026, up from $89,989 last year.

This is the post-tax value of a $100,000 salary in other Texas cities, and their ranking in the report:

Plano (No. 27): $72,653
Dallas (No. 47): $80,103
Austin (No. 53): $82,446
Lubbock (No. 59): $84,567
San Antonio (No. 62): $86,419
El Paso (No. 67): $90,276
Corpus Christi (No. 68): $91,110

According to the report, getting some "financial breathing room" by making six-figures really depends on where someone lives and what their lifestyle is. For residents living in the 42 states that levy some amount of income tax, their take-home pay dwindles further.

"And depending on how taxes are filed, reaching a $100,000 income may push a household from the 22 percent to 24 percent marginal tax bracket," the report's author wrote. "Meanwhile, locations with high costs across housing and everyday essentials may be less forgiving to a $100,000 income."

smartasset income finance six figures