"Salary" and "what someone actually earned" aren't always the same number. CompensationAtlas keeps them separate on purpose.
An employee's official salary rate is the base pay tied to their title and step — the figure most people mean by "salary." It's a fixed, budgeted number for the position.
Actual earnings is what someone was paid in a given period, which can differ from the base rate once overtime is added in. Wherever the underlying public payroll record includes overtime, CompensationAtlas shows it separately from the base salary rate rather than folding it into one blended number.
Collapsing rate and overtime into a single figure hides two very different stories: a high base rate reflects the position itself, while high overtime earnings on top of a modest base rate usually reflects staffing levels, scheduling demands, or a department under strain. Keeping them separate is what makes questions like "where does the overtime budget actually go" answerable at all — a question that's genuinely hard to answer from a raw payroll export without doing this separation yourself first.
Department rollup views can surface overtime leaders specifically, separate from base-rate leaders, letting you look at either question — or both — independently.
Only where the underlying public record includes it — not every position or department reports overtime the same way.
No — rate refers specifically to the base salary rate. Overtime is tracked and shown as a separate figure.
Yes — year-over-year comparisons let you see how overtime spending shifts across budget cycles, not just a single snapshot year.