Overtime at Austin’s police, fire and EMS departments is about to get a lot more transparent.
Austin’s police, fire and emergency medical services say they will start posting monthly reports that spell out how much overtime sworn staff are working and what kinds of leave they are using. City officials are pitching the move as a way to give the public and City Council regular, apples-to-apples snapshots of overtime management across the three departments.
The new reporting requirement comes from a City Council directive that ordered the City Manager to produce a publicly posted monthly report with aggregated overtime budgets, overtime hours and leave use for the Austin Police Department, Austin Fire Department and Austin-Travis County EMS. Per Resolution 20250813‑011, the first report was to be presented to the Council’s Public Safety Committee for review. The resolution also makes clear that the reports must be aggregated and cannot include employee names or other identifying information.
APD, AFD and ATCEMS rolled out draft dashboards to the City Council’s Public Safety Committee in February, showing templates for overtime, leave and other operational metrics as the departments worked to standardize how they report the data. Those briefings underscored that not all information can be fully automated right away and that some numbers will need to be compiled manually for now. Departments said they will keep refining the dashboards with committee feedback and that Austin Technology Services is scheduled to help with automation. The public presentation is available from the Public Safety Committee.
What the reports will show
The monthly files will lay out overtime hours worked by sworn staff and provide a breakdown of leave types, such as vacation and sick time, organized for comparison by day of the week. As outlined on the ATCEMS page, ATCEMS already publishes a “Sworn and Overtime Leave Use” series of monthly PDFs, and APD has a corresponding “Sworn and Overtime Leave Use” section on its APD page.
Numbers behind the push
Local reporting and reviews of city payroll records have helped explain why councilmembers wanted regular overtime updates. An investigation by KXAN found that citywide overtime payments jumped roughly 30% in fiscal 2022 to more than $112 million, and identified at least one ATCEMS field medic who logged about 3,691 overtime hours that year and received roughly $146,000 in extra pay on top of an approximately $50,000 base salary.
Timeline and hurdles
City staff caution that differences in reporting periods, multiple data sources and limited automation will mean the first months of publishing could look uneven and rely heavily on manual updates. The Public Safety Committee backup materials note those challenges and describe the dashboards as early drafts while departments work toward more automation.
Officials say the agencies will post monthly reports to each department’s reports webpage and aim to build a more automated, consolidated dashboard over time. The monthly PDFs and dashboards will be posted on each agency’s reports page; see ATCEMS, APD and Austin Fire for the first files and future updates. City leaders say the routine postings should give Council and the public a clearer, month-to-month way to track overtime use and leave trends.
