Pension salary data · Analysis
North Jersey: police pay against school-staff pay
12,280 active police officers and 59,313 active TPAF-enrolled school staff across 7 counties, on pensionable salaries reported to the state as of March 31, 2026.[1]
North Jersey is a convention, not a finding in the data. Every county is shown separately so the grouping cannot hide a county that runs against it.
The two distributions
Median pensionable salary in North Jersey
US dollars per year
| Police officers | $119,009 |
|---|---|
| School staff (TPAF) | $90,027 |
Across the whole range
How the two salary distributions overlap in North Jersey
Share of each group, by salary band
Pensionable salary. Vertical axis is share of each group, not headcount.
| Salary band | Police officers (share of 12,280) | School staff (TPAF) (share of 59,313) |
|---|---|---|
| $0k to $20k | 3.1% | 0.7% |
| $20k to $40k | 1.3% | 1.5% |
| $40k to $60k | 5.8% | 7.4% |
| $60k to $80k | 12.4% | 28.6% |
| $80k to $100k | 13.5% | 23.8% |
| $100k to $120k | 15.1% | 26.9% |
| $120k to $140k | 16.0% | 7.0% |
| $140k to $160k | 14.5% | 1.7% |
| $160k to $180k | 10.3% | 1.4% |
| $180k to $200k | 4.4% | 0.7% |
| $200k to $220k | 2.1% | 0.3% |
| $220k to $240k | 0.9% | 0.1% |
| $240k and above | 0.5% | 0.1% |
Against the rest of the state
Ratio of median police salary to median school-staff salary
Ratio of medians
| North Jersey | 1.32x |
|---|---|
| Central Jersey | 1.39x |
| South Jersey | 1.21x |
| Statewide | 1.32x |
Crude ratio
1.32x
Median against median, as the groups actually stand
Tenure-adjusted ratio
1.38x
higher than the crude figure
Coverage
100%
Share of the reference service distribution the adjustment covers
Service-year bands used: under 5 years, 5 to 10 years, 10 to 15 years, 15 to 20 years, 20 to 25 years, 25 years or more. A band counts only when both groups have at least 20 people in it, and the whole figure is withheld rather than published when the contributing bands do not cover enough of the reference.
The counties in North Jersey
Scroll sideways for more columns →
What these figures cannot tell you
- This is base salary, not total pay
- Pensionable base salary as reported to the pension system. It excludes overtime, stipends, longevity, off-duty detail pay and accrued-leave payouts for both groups. Actual compensation is higher for both, and this data cannot say by how much for either, so it cannot say which direction the omission moves the ratio.
- The work years are different lengths
- 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, not pay per day or per hour.
- The school side is not only classroom teachers
- Every active member of the Teachers Pension and Annuity Fund. The fund covers certificated school staff and the file carries no job title, so principals, supervisors and other certificated staff are counted alongside classroom teachers. School support staff (aides, secretaries, custodians, drivers) are enrolled in PERS instead and are not counted here, so this is not a school payroll figure.
- The regions are a convention
- North, Central and South follow the state planning-region convention. The line between them is a convention, not a finding in the data, and where Ocean County belongs is genuinely disputed. County figures are shown underneath every regional figure so the grouping never hides anything.
- County means the employer, not the household
- A member is counted in the county the pension system assigns to their employer. That is not where anyone lives, and it is not a school district boundary. Regional districts and consolidated districts cross municipal lines.
- The two workforces are not the same age
- Police can retire after 25 years of service, so the active police workforce is systematically less senior than the active school workforce. Median police service years are lower than median school-staff service years in every county in the state. The tenure-adjusted figure on this page exists to answer that, and it is usually the higher of the two.
- A pay ratio is not a budget statement
- Municipal police payrolls and school payrolls draw on different tax levies and different state aid formulas. Nothing on this page says a dollar moved from one to the other, and nothing here should be read that way.
- One date, not a trend
- Every figure comes from a single snapshot dated March 31, 2026. There is no year-over-year comparison here, and none should be inferred.
- Small groups are withheld
- A county or department with fewer than 30 people on one side of the comparison publishes no figure for that side and no ratio, rather than a number a handful of salaries could swing.
The full method, including how the tenure adjustment is computed and exactly which rows enter each figure, is set out in the methodology. The row-by-row account is published in the machine-readable data.
Questions and answers
Do police make more than teachers in North Jersey?
On pensionable salary, the median active police officer in North Jersey is at $119,009 against $90,027 for the median active TPAF-enrolled school staff member: a ratio of 1.32x and a gap of $28,982 a year, as of March 31, 2026. 88% of school staff in the region earn less than the median officer. Both figures are base pensionable salary and exclude overtime, stipends and leave payouts for both groups.
Which county in North Jersey has the widest gap?
Bergen County, at 1.65x (a $59,323 median gap). The narrowest in the region is Hudson County at 1.22x (a $20,878 gap). Regional figures average over counties that differ considerably, which is why every county is listed separately on this page.
What counties count as North Jersey here?
Bergen County, Essex County, Hudson County, Morris County, Passaic County, Sussex County, Warren County. North, Central and South follow the state planning-region convention. The line between them is a convention, not a finding in the data, and where Ocean County belongs is genuinely disputed. County figures are shown underneath every regional figure so the grouping never hides anything.
Does the comparison hold up once you account for years of service?
In North Jersey the tenure-adjusted ratio is 1.38x against a crude 1.32x. Police can retire after 25 years, so the active police workforce is less senior than the active school workforce, and re-weighting both groups onto one distribution of service years generally widens the gap rather than closing it.
Sources
- [1]YourMoney Active Pension Members (PFRS/SPRS subset) and YourMoney Active Pension Members (TPAF subset, names removed). New Jersey Department of the Treasury. Both snapshots as of March 31, 2026. Derived from the public YourMoney Active Pension Members dataset, https://www.yourmoney.nj.gov/. Figures are computed by this site from as-reported pensionable salaries; the row-by-row account of what entered each figure is published at /data/pay-comparison.json. ↩