About

Why

The City publishes its entire payroll: every title, agency, base salary and overtime dollar, back to fiscal year 2014. The raw file is difficult to search by title or agency.

This site prepares the payroll for searches by title and agency.

Scope

There is no name search or individual lookup. The source payroll includes names; this site reports by title and agency.

Read Data before citing a figure. Gender is inferred from first names, tenure counts time at the current agency, and the data cannot say whether pay is fair.

History

Title

A title is not a job description. It is a legal category, and that explains most of what looks strange in the data.

Before the 1880s, New York handed out government jobs through patronage. The reaction against that produced the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act, signed 16 January 1883, which made competitive examination the basis for federal hiring. The New York Civil Service Reform Association drafted most of it, and Senator George H. Pendleton of Ohio sponsored it. New York State passed its own law the same year, the first state to adopt a merit system, on a bill Theodore Roosevelt sponsored in the Assembly.

The surviving principle is that a public job belongs to the public rather than to whoever is in office. You make that true by defining the job in advance, testing for it, and paying it on a published schedule. That is what a title is: a defined class of work with an examination attached and a negotiated rate, administered now by the Department of Citywide Administrative Services, which runs more than 180 exams a year for over 110,000 candidates.

That is also why the payroll holds well over a thousand distinct titles, many oddly specific, some holding three people, some named for work that changed decades ago. Titles accumulate: creating one takes classification work and negotiation, and retiring one strands the people in it. Because the title carries the rate, most pay questions in City government are really questions about a title. That is why this site is organized around them.

Open Data Law

The City Council passed the Open Data Law on 29 February 2012, and Mayor Bloomberg signed it as Local Law 11 of 2012 on 7 March. It required every agency to publish its data sets on a single portal by the end of 2018, on top of access rights the State Freedom of Information Law had already established in 1974. Amendments in 2015, 2016 and 2017 tightened it further.

Citywide Payroll Data appeared on that portal covering fiscal year 2014 onward.

Built

R joins payroll records, adjusts dollar amounts and aggregates results, using data.table, dplyr, tidyr and jsonlite. The website uses static HTML, CSS and JavaScript, served from GitHub Pages.

Independence

No agency reviewed this site.

Credits

Data from NYC Citywide Payroll Data, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Zillow Observed Rent Index, and the Social Security Administration's baby name records. See Data for what each one is used for.

Claude was used in development.

Reuse

Code is BSD 3-Clause licensed. Compiled data can be reused with attribution; the source data retain their own terms. The Data page has the underlying CSV tables. Carry the fiscal year when republishing a figure.

Contact

If you find an error, open an issue.