In 2025, Phoenix’s highest city paychecks were largely dominated by the Police Department, with officers and retirees making up nearly 60% of the 424 employees earning over $200,000. Six retired police workers were among the top 10 earners, and while City Manager Jeff Barton officially topped the payroll, lieutenants, sergeants, and commanders saw their salaries balloon due to overtime and leave cash-outs.
As reported by Phoenix New Times, the paper mined the city’s public payroll dataset to track where the richest compensation packages landed. The data, posted on Phoenix’s Open Data website, folds in base salary, overtime, shift differentials and leave payouts, so those extra items are fully baked into the totals that pushed many city workers past the $200,000 mark. According to the New Times, six police employees in the top 10 each cleared roughly $390,000 in 2025.
Overtime and staffing explain big checks
A big part of the story is overtime. An analysis presented to city leaders found the Phoenix Police Department shelled out roughly $98 million on overtime in a single fiscal year while reporting it was short about 500 officers, according to Arizona’s Family. With fewer officers to cover shifts, the ones still on the job had ample opportunity to rack up extra hours.
The spending did not go unnoticed. Internal overtime reports obtained by TV station ABC15 showed some officers pulling in tens of thousands of dollars in overtime in a single month. That scrutiny helped spur new overtime rules and audits aimed at tightening oversight of who is working how much, and why the totals climbed so high.
Who topped the list
The city’s single highest-paid employee in 2025 was City Manager Jeff Barton, at about $501,275.50. Retired police Sgt. Jerry Barker Jr. and Assistant City Manager Inger Erickson followed close behind, each collecting payouts in the mid-$400,000s, according to Phoenix New Times. The rest of the top-10 lineup featured a familiar pattern: commanders and lieutenants who had recently retired and cashed out significant banks of accrued time.
Once all the extra pay components were factored in, the list was not just top brass and executive-level staff. Multiple rank-and-file supervisors and midlevel managers surfaced among the city’s highest earners, their final totals boosted by the way overtime, differentials and leave payouts stack onto base pay.
What the city’s pay rules allow
None of this happened by accident. The City of Phoenix’s compensation system, outlined in its pay ordinance, salary plans and memoranda of understanding, spells out how base pay, overtime and leave payouts are calculated. The city’s Total Compensation page breaks down those pieces and shows how various pay components roll into the published annual figures, according to the City of Phoenix compensation page.
That framework goes a long way toward explaining how former line officers and midranking supervisors can end up sharing space with top city managers on yearly pay charts. When decades of unused leave and steady overtime collide with generous payout rules, retirements start to look a lot like jackpots.
What to watch next
All that money is likely to keep drawing attention at City Hall. Budget watchdogs and council members are expected to push for sharper oversight of overtime and leave payouts as audits and reviews continue. City officials say they are rolling out better tracking tools and tightening controls, and independent reviews are expected to shed more light on how the biggest payouts piled up over time.
Look for more details to surface in upcoming audits and Public Safety and Justice committee briefings, where city leaders will have to confront a simple question: how long can Phoenix afford for its police payroll to look like this?
