What city work pays
Nurses, transit operators, firefighters, librarians, engineers: the people who run San Francisco, and what their work pays — 13 years of the Controller’s compensation data, published as aggregates only (no group smaller than 5 people).
Every City and County of San Francisco employee paid through the Controller's payroll in the fiscal year — including part-year and part-time staff (headcount, NOT full-time equivalents). Compensation = salaries + overtime + other salaries + benefits (retirement, health & dental, other).
Overtime since FY2013
$471.0M of overtime in FY2025 — 6.8% of all compensation, up from 4.3% in FY2013. It concentrates where services run around the clock.
Named department series start FY2017 (the study's label-clean window); full department histories keyed on stable codes live in payroll_by_dept_year.json. Top 8 departments by FY2025 overtime.
Counting rule: an employee counts when overtime pay exceeds base salary and the salary is above $1,000 — without that floor, job-change rows with near-zero salaries inflate the count (FY2025: 373 with the floor, 388 without).
Compensation by service area
51 departments in 6 service areas, FY2025.
Show all 51 departments by total pay
Showing 15 of 51 departments listed in the data. Department-years with fewer than 5 employees are included in citywide totals (payroll_by_year.json) but not listed here; organization-group rollups are computed from the listed rows only. n_employees_listed sums per-department headcounts — an employee working in two departments counts in each.
What the city pays, by kind of work
Total compensation by job family, FY2013–FY2025. The source’s job codes, grouped into 16 citizen-readable families.
The spread of city pay
Half of city workers earned between $106,367 and $225,576 in FY2025; the top 1% starts near $495,279 — and the whole distribution has drifted right, year after year.
The bump at the left is real but not poverty wages: 10.3% of FY2025 employees appear under $25k, mostly part-time and partial-year staff (poll workers, seasonal aides, mid-year hires). Percentiles are exact, computed on per-person annual totals. p10 IS NOT PUBLISHED: the bottom decile is dominated by part-year and part-time staff (FY2025: ~10% of employees under $25k), and a p10 line reads as 'poverty wages' when it mostly measures partial years. The published floor is p25; the low histogram bump is annotated instead.