PER-2026-3319B

Section 2E.2 of Session Law 2025-89 (the DAVE Act) established the Division of Accountability, Value, and Efficiency (DAVE) within OSA to assess the continued need for each State agency and the vacant positions in State government. As part of its mandate, DAVE engaged to perform a series of assessments of long-term vacancies and associated lapsed salaries across North Carolina.

This report presents the results of OSA’s analysis of long-term vacancies and lapsed salaries across North Carolina’s community colleges and is supplemented by an online interactive dashboard featuring the underlying data, available here.

As of December 31, 2025, North Carolina Community Colleges reported a total of 136 long-term vacancies. If these vacancies remained unfilled for an entire fiscal year, they would generate $10.4 million in lapsed salaries.

Community colleges have complex funding models that include both State and local sources, so not all of those funds are available to them. Because of these complex funding models, OSA does not recommend eliminating these vacancies for base budget accuracy, as noted in the January 2026 State Agencies of North Carolina Long-Term Vacancies and Their Lapsed Salaries report. Instead, this report is intended to increase transparency in the Community College system.

Details are provided in the report. North Carolina Community Colleges agreed with the findings in the report. 

OSA has published an online interactive dashboard with data from this report, viewable here.