Every Philadelphia city employee's salary is public record. Here's exactly what's available, where it comes from, how pay is structured across departments, and how to actually find the number you're looking for.
Yes. Salaries for city employees are public record under Pennsylvania's Right-to-Know Law, and Philadelphia publishes payroll data through OpenDataPhilly. The challenge has never been access — it's that raw payroll exports are enormous, inconsistently formatted files that don't answer a specific question on their own.
Job title, department, and both the official pay rate and total compensation actually earned in a given year (which can include overtime and differentials). Employee names are typically included; specific home addresses and personal identifiers are not.
Health benefits valuations, pension contributions, and personal identifying information beyond name and title are typically not part of the standard published payroll extract, though some of this information may be available through separate public records requests.
Philadelphia's city workforce spans dozens of departments — Police, Fire, Streets, Parks & Recreation, Licenses & Inspections, Water, and more — each with its own pay scales and collective bargaining agreements. Uniformed departments like Police and Fire typically follow rank-based pay scales negotiated through their unions, while civilian departments often follow a more traditional grade-and-step structure. That's exactly why a single department-by-department comparison is more useful than a single citywide average.
A citywide average salary tells you almost nothing. The real story is always in a specific department, a specific year, and a specific comparison.
An employee's official salary rate and what they actually earned in a year are two different numbers, and conflating them is the single most common mistake in reading city payroll data. Overtime, shift differentials, and mid-year promotions all cause them to diverge — sometimes significantly. A patrol officer's base rate might be modest, while their actual annual earnings, once overtime is factored in, tell a very different story.
When a city council member or reporter asks "how much does the city spend on X department," the honest answer usually requires actual earnings, not base rates, because base rates systematically understate true labor costs in departments that rely heavily on overtime.
An employee's compensation trajectory typically reflects a combination of scheduled step increases (built into most civil service pay scales), promotions to higher titles, departmental transfers, and periodic union-negotiated cost-of-living adjustments. Looking at a single year in isolation misses all of this — the same person's pay can look dramatically different depending on which year you happen to check.
CompensationAtlas lets you search by name, department, or title and see full career history — not just a single year's snapshot — with rate and actual earnings shown side by side, and comparisons against department peers. You can also filter by year to see department-wide compensation trends over time.
Typical questions people bring to this data include: how has a specific department's leadership compensation changed relative to frontline staff; which employees have the largest gap between rate and actual earnings; how does a department's average compensation compare to a peer department; and how has a specific role's pay scale shifted over multiple budget cycles.
Yes — CompensationAtlas tracks full career trajectories back to 2016, including promotions, transfers, and title changes.
Yes, where the underlying public record includes it. Public safety departments often show some of the largest gaps between rate and actual earnings due to overtime.
It uses the same underlying public data, but presents it as a searchable, connected profile rather than a raw file you have to process yourself.
CompensationAtlas refreshes as new payroll data is published, typically on a quarterly cadence matching the city's own release schedule.
Yes — you can pull up multiple profiles and compare rate, actual earnings, and career trajectory side by side.
For the bigger picture, see our Government Transparency Guide.