15 Million Government Salary Records, Fully Searchable

How much does a New York City firefighter earn? What's the highest-paid position in the California state government? How do federal salaries compare across agencies? These questions have answers buried in public payroll data — but until now, finding them required FOIA requests, data wrangling, or expensive premium databases. GovernmentSalaries.org makes 15 million+ salary records instantly searchable across 21 dedicated sites.

Federal Employee Compensation

The federal salaries section covers 1.5 million employees across every federal agency. The data, sourced from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), includes base pay, locality adjustments, bonus pay, and total compensation. Users can search by agency, job title, location, or salary range.

This is the same dataset that powers our Federal Brain Drain analysis — but presented as a searchable directory rather than an analytical tool. Want to know what a GS-13 program analyst at the Department of Energy earns in Washington, D.C. versus Denver? The data is there, filterable and sortable in seconds.

The federal dataset also enables macro-level analysis: which agencies pay the most on average, how compensation varies by location, and how federal pay compares to private-sector equivalents for similar roles.

New York City: The Largest Municipal Payroll

The NYC payroll database is one of our most comprehensive, containing 5.6 million records spanning multiple fiscal years. This covers every city employee — from police officers and teachers to sanitation workers and administrators — with detailed breakdowns of base salary, overtime pay, and other compensation.

Overtime data is particularly revealing. In some years, individual officers or firefighters earn more in overtime than their base salary. The platform lets journalists, watchdog groups, and citizens explore these patterns and ask hard questions about workforce management and cost control.

State and Major City Coverage

Beyond the federal government and NYC, GovernmentSalaries.org covers the major states and cities where public payroll data is available:

• California — 1 million state employee records including the UC and CSU systems
• New Jersey — 1.2 million records spanning state, county, and municipal employees
• LA County — 1.1 million records from the nation's largest county government
• San Francisco — 1 million records from one of America's highest-cost cities
• Philadelphia — 808,000 records across city departments
• Texas, Florida, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, and Washington, D.C.

Why Salary Transparency Matters

Government employees are paid with taxpayer money. That makes their compensation a matter of public interest — not to shame individual workers, but to ensure accountability in how public resources are allocated.

Salary transparency serves multiple important functions:

• Accountability: Citizens can verify that compensation aligns with the responsibilities of each role and that pay practices are fair and equitable
• Equity analysis: Researchers can examine pay gaps by gender, race, and job classification within government workforces
• Recruitment: Prospective government employees can understand realistic compensation before applying, improving hiring outcomes
• Budget oversight: Elected officials and budget analysts can identify compensation trends that drive budget growth

When a city's overtime spending doubles in two years, that's a story. When a state agency's average salary significantly exceeds comparable positions elsewhere, that deserves scrutiny. GovernmentSalaries.org provides the raw data to support this kind of analysis at every level of government.

Explore the Data

Visit GovernmentSalaries.org to search any of the 21 payroll databases. Every search is free, every record is public, and the data is updated as new payroll releases become available.

GovernmentSalaries.org is one of the government transparency platforms built by TheDataProject.AI — making public data usable, searchable, and accessible to everyone.