California City Government Compensation (Government Compensation in California)
California requires every city to report what it pays its employees. This dataset has that information for 2023 and 2024: the base salary, overtime, bonuses, and benefits (retirement and health insurance) for each position. So if you want to know what a firefighter makes in Los Angeles versus Fresno, or how much a city budgets for employee benefits, this is where that data lives. It comes straight from the State Controller's Office, though cities self-report the numbers rather than having them independently verified.
- Source rows:
- 5,142,222
- Coverage:
- 2009-01-01T00:00:00Z – 2024-12-31T00:00:00Z
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Views organize this dataset for different questions.
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By entity
City-level compensation totals by year: total wages, total retirement/health contributions, and position (headcount) counts across all reported positions. The primary view for comparing total public compensation across California cities, and for joining to ca-sco/city-financials on entity_name + year.
View defined in OpenData · Source: ca-sco
Dataset overview
This overview is independent of the table. Table selections and filters do not change it.
Questions this data answers
- What is the total compensation (wages plus benefits) for a specific position in a given California city?
- How much overtime pay did city employees receive in 2024 compared to 2023?
- Which cities have the highest average employer contributions to retirement and health benefits?
- How do benefits costs vary across different departments within a city?
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CSV: all rows from “by-entity”.
Table filters, sorting and pagination are not included.
Columns
10 columns in this table.