Albany's City Employee Salaries

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People are at the center of the City of Albany’s government.  Around 2600 full, part-time and seasonal members of the team provide public safety, manage the City’s infrastructure, deliver social services and more.  With some digging we can identify that people costs (base compensation, overtime, health insurance and social security) make up $135 million of the City of Albany’s 2026 budget, nearly 60% of the budget.   

We wanted to understand the details of City compensation in more detail:

• Which departments have the highest salaries?
• How does compensation change, year-to-year, by department and what explains those changes?
• What are the roles that have the highest actual compensation?

We understand that compensation discussions can be contentious.  Our focus is to provide insight on the costs that the City bears as we all examine the City’s current financial crisis.  We’re approaching this article the same way we’ve approached crime reports, parking tickets, and city budget information - we analyze the records and report facts in an unbiased manner. 

On February 2nd, 2026 we filed a FOIL request with the city of Albany for records pertaining to the salary of all city workers. Those records were to include the total salary, overtime, and additional compensation, department, title, and so forth. The city provided those records on March 31st, 2026. 

Historically employee compensation data has been available on the City's Open Data website, https://data.albanyny,.gov/, however this website has not been active and available since the beginning of 2026.

We can examine City compensation at a high level:

• Total based + variable compensation to all City employees - $113,338,621 
• Total base salary for all employees - $86,349,522
• Total overtime costs - $17,178,456  
• All other compensation - $9,180,643

Note: Albany City School District is not a part of City compensation 

We examined the median salary for each department and compared that to the median household income in Albany. We went with median over average because of the numerous variables that could impact an employee's salary, i.e., position, overtime, bonuses, etc. The records show that the highest median pay (including OT and bonuses), over $159k, was associated with the Albany Police Department Detective Division. The low median pay for APD Patrol/SO is due to positions like School Crossing Officer being grouped in this department/category.

For comparison, we added the City of Albany's median housedhold income in Orange below.

Next, we examined the year-over-year change in total salary paid by each department. For Albany Police Department (APD), there are several charge codes and titles. For instance, the department may have “Detective Division” listed as part of the record and the “Position Title” lists that employee as “Police Officer”. In other instances the “Position Title” is “Police Officer”, but grouped under “APD Patrol/SO”, which we group into its own category to distinguish the cities designation of a particular specialty, i.e., mounted officers, in the APD. 

The figures below shows the different departments and the change in total salary paid from 2024 to 2025. Next to each department are numbers within parentheses, which represents the change in number of employees for that department, for example “Fire Department (2)” had a total increase in two additional employees paid with their charge code from 2024 to 2025.

APD Patrol had an increase of 21 additional employees compared to 2024 and a change of over $2.25M in salary from 2024 to 2025. The next largest department jump was "Administration" which saw a year-over-year increase of $1.65M with a low (2) net increase in employees.  

There were a few departments that saw a decrease in salaries paid, such as Treasurer and Bldgs and Regulatory Compliance, despite no headcount change. This could be the result of senior people retiring and newer hires at lower salaries coming, a reduction in OT and bonuses paid, or both.

We analyzed the top 50 salaries paid to city employees in 2025.  There are two charts below, the first shows an unfiltered list, the second we remove all APD employees because they constitute a majority of the unfiltered list. 

A few quick numbers: highest salary (base plus compensation) was $285,884.83, highest non-APD salary was a Fire Captain with $181,268.75, and Mayor Sheehan received $143,648.96. The total pay is presented in the blue and regular (base) pay is in orange. 

The Top 50 non-APD salaries are below. Many of these are associated with the Fire Department; however, there’s more representation from other departments than the unfiltered records. 

In this first pass analysis we answered a few questions:

• Which departments have the highest salaries?
• How does compensation change, year-to-year, by department and what explains those changes?
• What are the roles that have the highest actual compensation?

Moving forward, we plan to use the data contained in these records and revisit some of the recent budget stories we’ve published.  We may also further analyze the 2024 and 2025 salary data based on new information or ideas in the coming weeks. If there are any pieces of information that spike your interest, please reach out!