Public Employee Salary Data: Where to Find Government Pay Records

Government employee salaries are public information in the United States. This surprises a lot of people when they first hear it, but the logic is straightforward: taxpayers fund government salaries, so taxpayers have the right to know how their money is being spent. This transparency applies at every level -- federal, state, county, city, school district, and public university. If someone is paid with public dollars, their compensation is, with very few exceptions, a matter of public record.

What's less straightforward is finding this data. There's no single website where you can look up every government employee's salary in the country. Instead, the records are scattered across hundreds of databases, portals, and FOIA-responsive agencies. I've spent a lot of time tracking down these sources, and this guide consolidates what I've learned.

Why Government Salaries Are Public

The principle that government compensation should be transparent is rooted in basic democratic accountability. Voters and taxpayers need to be able to evaluate whether public funds are being spent responsibly. Are executives at a public agency making reasonable salaries? Are there pay disparities between departments? Is overtime driving costs higher than expected? Without salary transparency, it would be much harder to answer these questions.

At the federal level, public salary disclosure is grounded in the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and the principle that government records are presumptively public. Federal courts have consistently held that the names and salaries of government employees are not protected by FOIA's privacy exemptions, because there's a minimal privacy interest in one's government salary compared to the strong public interest in knowing how tax dollars are spent.

At the state level, open records laws -- which exist in all 50 states -- similarly require disclosure of government employee compensation. Some states have explicit statutes mandating salary transparency, while others rely on broader open records frameworks that encompass payroll data.

It's worth noting that this transparency extends to elected officials. Congressional salaries, for example, are set by statute and publicly disclosed. As of 2026, members of the U.S. House and Senate earn $174,000 annually, with the Speaker of the House earning $223,500. The President earns $400,000, and the Vice President earns $235,100. These figures are not secret; they're established by law.

Federal Employee Salary Data

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM)

The Office of Personnel Management maintains the most comprehensive dataset of federal civilian employee compensation. OPM publishes the FedScope database, which contains detailed information about the federal workforce, including salary ranges, agency, duty station, occupation, and length of service. FedScope data is available at fedscope.opm.gov and can be explored through interactive tools or downloaded in bulk.

However, FedScope reports salary data in ranges rather than exact figures for individual employees. If you want a specific federal employee's salary, you'll typically need to file a FOIA request with their agency, or use a service that has compiled this data.

General Schedule (GS) Pay Tables

Most federal civilian employees are paid according to the General Schedule (GS), a structured pay system with 15 grades (GS-1 through GS-15) and 10 steps within each grade. Pay tables are published annually by OPM and vary by locality -- an employee at GS-12 Step 5 in Washington, D.C. earns more than someone at the same grade and step in rural Mississippi, due to locality pay adjustments.

If you know a federal employee's grade and step, you can look up their exact salary in the published pay tables. This is one of the reasons government salary searches are relatively straightforward at the federal level: the pay structure is standardized and publicly documented.

Senior Executive Service (SES) employees, political appointees, and employees under other pay systems (like the Foreign Service or certain specialized scales) have separate pay structures, but these are also publicly documented.

USASpending.gov

While USASpending.gov is primarily a database of federal contracts and grants, it can be useful for understanding how federal agencies allocate their budgets, including personnel costs. It won't give you individual salaries, but it provides context about agency-level spending that complements employee-level data.

Congressional Staff Salaries

Salaries for employees of the U.S. House are published in the Statement of Disbursements, which is released quarterly. Senate staff salaries are published in the Report of the Secretary of the Senate. Both are publicly available and searchable. These reports show exactly how much each congressional staffer earns, making Capitol Hill one of the more transparent workplaces in government.

State Employee Salary Data

Every state makes government employee compensation data available to the public, but the ease of access varies significantly.

States with Excellent Online Databases

Many states have created dedicated transparency portals where you can search employee salaries by name, agency, or job title. Some of the best include:

• Texas -- the Texas Tribune maintains an exceptionally well-designed database of state employee salaries at salaries.texastribune.org, covering over 700,000 employees
• California -- the State Controller's Office publishes salary and compensation data through the Government Compensation in California portal (publicpay.ca.gov)
• Illinois -- the State Comptroller's office runs a salary database searchable by name, agency, or job title
• Ohio -- the Ohio Checkbook site provides searchable salary data for state employees
• New York -- the Empire State Development site and the state comptroller's office provide payroll data through the Open Book New York portal

States Where It's Harder

In some states, you may need to submit a formal open records request to get employee salary data, particularly for employees of local agencies or smaller departments. The data exists -- it's public -- but it hasn't been proactively published online. In these cases, a written request to the relevant human resources department or the agency's open records officer is usually all it takes, though response times vary.

Public University Salaries

Employees of public universities -- including professors, administrators, coaches, and staff -- are government employees, and their salaries are public. University salary data is often available through the same state transparency portals that cover other state employees, though some universities maintain their own compensation databases.

University compensation data often attracts attention because it can include very high salaries -- particularly for medical school faculty, football coaches, and university presidents. It's not uncommon for the highest-paid public employee in a state to be a university football or basketball coach, earning several million dollars annually. Whether that's reasonable is a policy question, but the data is there for anyone to examine.

Local Government Salary Data

Salaries for city, county, and school district employees are also public records. This includes police officers, firefighters, teachers, city managers, building inspectors, librarians, and everyone else on a local government payroll.

Access to local salary data is more fragmented than federal or state data. Some cities and counties publish searchable salary databases on their websites. Others include compensation data in their annual budgets, which are public documents. For smaller municipalities, you may need to submit an open records request to the city clerk or HR department.

Several news organizations and nonprofits have compiled local salary data into searchable databases:

• The Asbury Park Press maintains a searchable database of New Jersey public employee salaries
• The Detroit Free Press provides Michigan public salary data
• Open The Books (openthebooks.com) has compiled over 200 million compensation records across federal, state, and local government
• Many local newspapers maintain their own salary databases for their regions

What Fields Are Typically Available

Government salary records generally include more than just a single number. A typical record might contain:

• Employee name -- first and last name, sometimes with middle initial
• Job title -- the official position title
• Department or agency -- where the employee works
• Base salary or annual rate -- the standard annual compensation
• Overtime pay -- additional compensation for hours worked beyond the standard schedule
• Bonus or incentive pay -- any performance-based or special compensation
• Total compensation -- the sum of all cash compensation
• Benefits value -- some databases include the estimated value of health insurance, retirement contributions, and other benefits
• Hire date or years of service -- how long the employee has been in their position or with the agency

The distinction between base salary and total compensation matters a lot, and it's one of the most common sources of confusion when people look at government pay data. A police officer with a base salary of $75,000 might have total compensation of $140,000 after overtime, holiday pay, and benefits. Both numbers are "correct," but they tell very different stories.

Common Misconceptions

"Government employees are overpaid." This is a common reaction when people first encounter salary data, especially for senior positions. But compensation comparisons are meaningful only in context. Federal employees, for example, tend to be more educated than the general workforce -- a large percentage of federal jobs require advanced degrees. When economists control for education, experience, and job complexity, government compensation is often comparable to or below private sector equivalents, particularly for highly skilled positions. The reverse can be true for lower-skilled positions, where government pay may exceed private sector norms. The data doesn't support a blanket claim in either direction.

"If someone's salary is public, everything about their job is public." Not quite. While compensation is public, other personnel information -- performance evaluations, disciplinary records, medical information, and certain aspects of employment history -- may be protected from disclosure depending on the jurisdiction and the specific records involved. Salary transparency doesn't mean total transparency about every aspect of someone's employment.

"All public employees appear in salary databases." Not all of them, no. Certain categories of employees may be excluded from public salary databases for safety reasons. Undercover law enforcement officers, for instance, or employees in sensitive intelligence positions may have their names and details withheld. These exclusions are narrow and specific, though.

"The salary listed is what they take home." The published salary is gross pay -- before taxes, retirement contributions, health insurance premiums, and other deductions. An employee with a listed salary of $100,000 has a significantly lower take-home pay. This should be obvious, but I've seen people make direct comparisons between listed government salaries and their own net pay, which isn't an apples-to-apples comparison.

How to Use This Data

Government salary data serves several practical purposes beyond simple curiosity:

Salary negotiation. If you're applying for a government job, published salary data tells you exactly what the position pays. This eliminates the guesswork that characterizes private sector salary negotiation. You can see what current employees in similar roles earn and calibrate your expectations accordingly.

Civic oversight. Salary data lets taxpayers evaluate whether their government is spending personnel dollars wisely. Are administrative positions proliferating? Is overtime out of control in certain departments? Are executives compensated in line with comparable jurisdictions? These are questions that salary data can help answer.

Journalism and research. Reporters use salary data regularly to investigate public spending, identify pay disparities, and hold officials accountable. Academic researchers use it to study compensation equity, the gender pay gap in public employment, and the relationship between public and private sector wages.

People searches. Salary data is one component of the broader universe of public records that can be used to find and verify information about individuals. Services like OpenDataUSA aggregate multiple data sources, including government compensation records, to provide a more complete picture. You can start a search here to see what publicly available information exists for any individual.

For more on navigating public data, check out our guides on public data sources in the U.S. and campaign finance records, or browse all of our educational articles.