Why Posted Pay Ranges Mislead Your Police Compensation Study

Oct 2

3 min read

Sooner or later a council member, a union president or a city manager asks the question every chief dreads: are we actually behind market, or does it just feel that way? Most compensation studies answer it by lining up the posted pay ranges of nearby agencies. That answer is fast, cheap and often wrong.

What a posted range tells you, and what it doesn't

A posted range tells you what an agency is allowed to pay. It does not tell you what that agency is paying the officers it actually has. Two departments can post identical ranges and pay very different wages, because the money depends on where their people sit on the scale.

Agencies with high turnover have rosters full of officers at the bottom few steps. Agencies with slow step progression take 15 or more years to reach the top of a range that looks generous on paper. Comparing midpoints treats both as if their officers sit in the middle. Few do.

An illustrative example

The figures in this section are hypothetical and for illustration only. Suppose a comparator posts a police officer range of $52,000 to $78,000. The midpoint is $65,000, and that is the number most studies would carry into the comparison table.

Now look at the roster. After several years of heavy turnover, most of that agency's officers are in their first four years and sit on the first few steps. The median officer actually earns about $56,500. Your department, measured against $65,000, looks underpaid by double digits. Measured against $56,500, you may be at market or ahead of it.

Those two conclusions lead to very different recommendations, and a very different conversation at the budget hearing. Only one of them survives a finance director who asks to see the data.

Three more ways comparator data goes wrong

The wrong comparators. The nearest agencies on a map are not always the ones you compete with for talent. The right comparator set is built from where your officers actually leave to and where your applicants come from.
Ignoring time to top step. A higher maximum means little if it takes 20 years to reach. Career earnings over the first ten years often matter more to a recruit than the top of the range.
Base pay only. Certification pay, shift differential, education incentives, take-home vehicles, overtime practices and the employer's retirement contribution can outweigh a few percent of base pay.

What a defensible study does instead

The ApexOS Workforce Intelligence Study is built around one rule: benchmark against what officers are really paid, by agencies that really compete with you. In practice that means:

Collecting incumbent-level pay from comparators, not only their published pay plans.
Selecting comparators from your own separation and recruitment data.
Modeling earnings across a career, so step structure and progression speed are visible.
Comparing total compensation, not base pay alone.
Tying staffing recommendations to workload, not last year's authorized strength.

The result is a recommendation your council, your auditor and your bargaining unit can each test against the same evidence.

Questions to ask before you commission a study

Will the consultant use incumbent pay, or only posted ranges?
How will comparator agencies be selected, and can we see the reasoning?
Will the study show career earnings, or only minimums and maximums?
Which forms of pay beyond base salary will be included?
Will staffing recommendations be tied to workload data?

If the answers are vague, the findings will be too.

Heading into a budget cycle, a contract negotiation or a retention problem? Book a discovery call with ApexOS Advisory at apexosadvisory.com/book-online. We will tell you what a defensible study of your agency would need, and whether you need one at all.