More than 900 Seattle Police Department employees opened swollen paychecks on June 12 only to learn months later that the extra money was a mistake the city now wants back. Seattle overpaid its police employees by more than $13 million, the result of a payroll calculation that used 2020 base salaries instead of each employee's actual 2024 pay rate.
The error traces back to a retroactive 6% wage increase that Seattle Police employees were owed for hours worked in 2024, according to The Seattle Times. An unidentified city employee entered 2020 pay rates rather than 2024 base rates when calculating the retroactive bump, and because officers and sergeants earned at least 30% less in 2020 than in 2024, the miscalculation inflated the payout dramatically. If the total were split evenly, each affected employee would have received more than $14,000 added to a single paycheck. As KOMO News reports, the retroactive increase came from a Seattle Police Officers Guild labor contract and was delivered as a one-time payment in officers' paychecks on June 12.
How the Mistake Surfaced
Seattle Police contacted the city's Budget Office in mid-July to report a discrepancy, and the Seattle Budget Office itself learned of the payroll error roughly a month after the overpayments went out, per the Seattle Times account. Other city officials were notified by mid-July as well, but the Seattle City Council was not informed until early August — at least two weeks after the Budget Office first learned of the problem. KOMO's report adds that the discrepancy initially showed up as a gap in the 2026 budget, with Seattle Police seeing 2026 budget expenses $13.1 million higher than forecasted.
Alex Hudson, a spokesperson for Mayor Katie Wilson's office, said the city spent about $13.1 million on the overpayments but that the error will have no effect on the city's long-term finances. Seattle Police officials were expected to notify affected employees about the mistake by Wednesday, and officers were formally notified in September of the specific amounts they'll be expected to repay. Several officers told KOMO News they'd been asked to pay back between $10,000 and $20,000.
Union Grievance and Repayment Rules
The Seattle Police Officers Guild has filed a grievance on behalf of affected employees, and because those workers are union members, the city must bargain with guild leaders over how repayment will be handled rather than impose terms unilaterally. City officials expect to start that bargaining process promptly. Nonunion employees caught up in the error, by contrast, must return the overpaid amounts through a state-law process that does not require negotiation.
Under Washington state law, an overpayment is defined as wages paid for a pay period in an amount greater than what was actually earned for that period, according to the Washington Legislature's statute governing public employer wage recovery. Separately, a labor agreement between the City of Seattle and the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers notes that when an overpayment spans multiple paychecks, repayment may be handled through a repayment schedule, according to the City of Seattle's contract documentation. Mostly police officers and sergeants are among the affected employees, though the city has also said police officers, management and civilian staff were included, according to PubliCola.
Budget Fallout and New Safeguards
Recovering the 2026 overpayment shortfall may require funding from the city's year-end supplemental budget, the Seattle Times reports. The payroll mistake lands amid broader budget scrutiny of the department: Mayor Wilson's proposed 2027 budget allocates $556 million to Seattle Police, part of a $9.1 billion citywide spending plan, with the department receiving a net budget increase of $68 million from the prior year.
To prevent a repeat, the budget office and the Office of City Finance will now have to sign off on all retroactive payments before they go out, with approval also required from the employee's own department, per PubliCola's reporting. The Office of City Finance is updating the city's payroll manual to spell out the new approval requirement, and the finance office is working alongside the budget office on broader payroll oversight and governance standards going forward.
Neither Seattle Police Department representatives nor police union representatives immediately responded to inquiries about the overpayments, the Seattle Times reports. The episode isn't unique to Seattle — PubliCola has previously reported that Austin disclosed a separate payroll glitch that overpaid 675 employees by $1.4 million earlier this year, underscoring how retroactive pay calculations can go wrong even in well-staffed municipal payroll systems.
Context From the 2024 Contract
The retroactive raise at the center of this error stems from a Seattle Police Officers Guild contract that, per PubliCola's earlier reporting, included retroactive wage increases totaling 23% over three years and raised starting officer pay from just over $83,000 to nearly $103,000 before overtime. That followed Seattle's previous police contract, signed in 2018, which cost the city an additional $65 million. The current overpayment saga shows how complex retroactive pay calculations tied to multi-year raises can still trip up city payroll systems years later.
