Boston taxpayers who like to know where every dollar goes just got a new rabbit hole to dive into. The city’s 2025 pay records are now out in detail, showing who pulled in the biggest checks and where overtime stacked up across thousands of municipal jobs.
The Boston Herald has posted an interactive “Your Tax Dollars at Work” database that dropped Friday, with more than 25,000 rows covering the city’s payroll and related agencies. You can search by name, department and pay category, and sort by base pay, overtime or other compensation to see exactly how taxpayer money flows through city paychecks.
What Stands Out
One pattern has already been flagged in previous years. A Boston Globe analysis found that police overtime has recently been a major driver of the city’s largest payroll totals, with nearly 100 officers taking home more than $100,000 in overtime in 2023. That level of concentrated overtime pay has repeatedly fueled debates about staffing levels, priorities and whether the city’s long‑term budget picture can keep absorbing it.
How The Numbers Break Down
The Herald’s table separates base salary, gross pay, overtime, injury pay, education incentives and “other” compensation. As laid out by the Boston Herald, that structure lets users see whether a big paycheck reflects regular salary, negotiated raises or one‑time payouts. Looking at those buckets side by side is the cleanest way to tell whether payroll growth is built into the system or driven by occasional spikes.
What It Means For The Budget
These numbers are not just spreadsheet trivia. Recent City Council filings and budget orders show that the FY25 collective‑bargaining changes include market adjustments, 2% base‑wage increases and small flat add‑ons for some unions, plus several supplemental appropriations to cover the tab, according to City of Boston documents. Put together with pockets of high overtime, those negotiated bumps are a big reason councilors and watchdogs keep circling back to payroll records when they want answers about where the budget is tightening or stretching.
How To Use The List
If you want to poke around yourself, start by pulling up departments that operate in your neighborhood, then sort by “total pay” to see who lands at the top. From there, drill into the overtime and “other pay” columns to see what is pushing those totals higher. The dataset itself is straight public record material, with no built‑in explanation, but it gives residents and reporters a solid launchpad for targeted questions at City Hall about staffing, overtime policies and whether recent contracts are delivering value for the people footing the bill.
