The New Jersey towns where police pay looks lower than school pay

New Jersey publishes what it pays the people in its pension systems. Two of those systems cover the two workforces most local budgets argue about: the Police and Firemen's Retirement System, and the Teachers Pension and Annuity Fund. They report the same kind of figure, on the same date, in the same file, which makes them comparable in a way that most pay comparisons are not.

Statewide the answer is not close. The median active police officer reports a pensionable salary of $115,284. The median active member of the teachers' fund reports $87,380. That is a ratio of 1.32, and a gap of $27,904 a year.^[1]

County by county the answer stays the same and the size changes a lot: from 1.05 in Cumberland County to 1.65 in Bergen.^[1] Every one of the 21 counties lands above parity. The full comparison carries each county, its distribution, and the figures behind everything below.

Go one level further down and something breaks.

Thirty-six departments where it runs backwards

Of 415 municipal police departments large enough to publish a median, 350 could be matched to a school district in the same municipality. Across those 350 the median department pays its officers 1.41 times what the local district pays its staff, and the range is wide: from 0.68 to 2.64.^[2]

Thirty-six of the 350 sit below 1.0. In those towns the median officer's pensionable salary is lower than the median at the school district down the road.^[2]

That looks like a counter-example to the statewide figure. It is mostly a different thing wearing the same clothes.

The 36 are the young forces

The pension file reports years of service alongside salary, and the 36 departments separate cleanly on it.

In those 36, the median officer has 7 years of service and the median staff member at the matched district has 15.^[1] That is an eight-year difference in seniority between the two groups being compared. In the 144 departments at the other end, where officers out-earn local school staff by half again or more, the same two numbers are 11 and 13.^[1] A two-year difference.

Police pay scales step up with years served, and so do teacher scales. A department that has hired heavily in the past decade will show a low median for as long as those hires sit near the bottom of the scale, whatever the scale's top looks like.

Atlantic City is the clearest case, because it is large enough that the pattern is not noise. Its 294 active officers have a median of 8 years of service and a median pensionable salary of $79,360. The 768 staff at the Atlantic City school district have a median of 16 years and $100,140.^[1] On medians, the department is at 0.79 of its district.

The department's 75th percentile officer earns $124,220.^[1] That is above the district's median, and above the district's own 75th percentile. The top half of the scale is not lower in Atlantic City. The bottom half is fuller.

The same mechanism, pointing the other way

This cuts against the reading most people expect, so it is worth stating plainly: police officers can retire after 25 years of service, and the active police workforce is therefore younger, in service terms, than the active school workforce. Statewide the median officer has 10 years of service and the median school staff member has 13.^[1] That holds in all 21 counties.

Which means the tenure difference is not a reason the headline gap is overstated. It is a reason the headline gap is understated.

This site publishes a tenure-adjusted ratio next to the crude one for exactly that reason. It re-weights both groups onto a single distribution of service years, so the comparison is not moved by one workforce being younger than the other. In Burlington County the crude ratio is 1.06 and the adjusted ratio is 1.27.^[2] Burlington's officers have a median of 8 years of service against 14 in its schools, the widest such gap of any county, and correcting for it moves the county from near-parity to a fifth apart.^[1]

Bergen County moves the other way, from 1.65 to 1.52, because its police are close to its school staff in seniority to begin with.^[2]

What this comparison is not

A median is a description of one workforce at one moment. It is not a budget statement. Municipal police payrolls and school payrolls draw on different tax levies and different state aid formulas, and nothing here traces a dollar from one to the other.

Three limits matter before anyone quotes a number from it.

The figures are pensionable base salary. They exclude overtime, stipends, longevity and accrued-leave payouts, for both groups. Real compensation is higher on both sides and this data cannot say by how much on either, so it cannot say which way the omission moves the ratio.

A school contract year and a police work year are not the same length. The source carries no work-year field, so these are annual salaries compared as reported, and not pay per day.

The teachers' fund covers more than classroom teachers. It takes in certificated school staff generally, and the file records no job title, so principals and supervisors are counted alongside teachers. School support staff, the aides and secretaries and custodians and drivers, are enrolled in a different system entirely and are not counted here at all. This is not a school payroll figure.

The 36 departments are worth reading with all of that in front of you. They are not towns that decided to pay police less. They are, for the most part, towns whose police departments are earlier in the same climb.