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Compensation & Benefits Studies
What the market actually pays, where your agency sits against it at every stage of a career, and what closing the gap would cost.
A salary survey is not a compensation study
Most agencies have at some point assembled a spreadsheet of what neighboring departments pay a starting officer. It is a reasonable thing to do, and it almost never settles the question, because it compares one number in isolation. It does not adjust for the fact that a 24/48 fire schedule and a 40-hour administrative post are paid across a different number of annual hours. It does not account for what the employee pays back into the pension, which can invert the ranking entirely. It says nothing about what happens at year ten, which is where departments actually lose people.
A compensation study is the work of turning that comparison into something a council can act on and a bargaining unit can examine. We build the peer set on written criteria, normalize every figure to a common basis, compare base pay across the whole career rather than at entry alone, then layer in benefits, incentives, and the employer cost of retirement to arrive at total compensation and at take-home pay.
| Career stage | Percentile | Position against peer median |
|---|---|---|
| Academy entry | 48th | At market |
| Year 1 | 45th | At market |
| Year 5 | 38th | Slipping |
| Year 10 | 27th | Below market |
| Year 15 | 24th | Below market |
| Year 20 | 22nd | Below market |
Method
How a compensation study is built
The sequence below is the one we follow on a full sworn compensation engagement. Its purpose is to produce findings that survive examination by a finance director, a union negotiator, and a newspaper on the same afternoon.
Establish the operating environment first
Before anything is compared, we document the community profile, the drivers of service demand, and the structure of the local labor market. A department whose workload is driven by through traffic, tourism, or a neighboring employment center cannot be benchmarked against a population-matched peer as though those conditions did not exist. This step is what keeps the comparison honest.
Build the peer group on written criteria, then stratify it
Peers are selected against stated criteria: population within a defined bracket, geographic proximity and shared commute shed, similarity of service delivery and call profile, comparable governance model, and labor market and cost-of-living conditions. The set is then divided into tiers that answer different questions. A direct-peer tier establishes market position. A regional competitor tier shows where departing employees actually go. An aspirational tier shows what the market is moving toward. Peer sets of roughly nine to twenty-one agencies are typical, and we use different sets for base salary, benefits, and retirement rather than forcing one list to serve every purpose.
Collect from primary documents, and date every figure
Collective bargaining agreements, adopted pay plans and civil service schedules, budget documents with position control, published pension system benefit guides, and direct correspondence with municipal human resources staff. Every figure carries an effective date and is current within roughly twelve months. Negotiated but unimplemented increases are recorded separately from the baseline so that a study is not overtaken by a raise that has not yet taken effect. Where two sources disagree, the discrepancy is reconciled with the client rather than resolved silently.
Convert everything to a common basis before comparing
This is the step that separates a defensible study from a list of headline salaries. Figures are converted to annual equivalents on a declared hours basis, commonly 2,080 hours for forty-hour classifications, 2,756 for a 24/48 fire schedule, and 2,912 for a fifty-six-hour FLSA configuration, with adjustment for Kelly days and differing FLSA work periods. The conversion arithmetic is printed in the report so that anyone can check it.
Compare base pay across the whole career, in isolation
Supplemental and incentive pay is deliberately excluded at this stage, because base pay is the most consistently comparable figure across jurisdictions and because mixing the two obscures which is actually causing a gap. Comparison runs from the academy rate and post-academy entry through years one, five, ten, fifteen, and twenty, then across each supervisory and command rank at both entry and top-out.
Four analytical lenses over the same data
Rank-by-rank comparison establishes position at each level. Percentile analysis places the agency against the distribution rather than against an average. Progression analysis shows whether a pay plan is front-loaded, back-loaded, or flat, which determines when in a career the agency becomes vulnerable. Compression analysis tests promotional differentials against a fifteen to twenty percent standard and identifies the points where taking a promotion stops being worth it.
Analyze each benefit component separately
Health plan design and premium cost sharing by coverage tier, employer contributions to health savings and reimbursement accounts, dental, vision, life and disability cover, leave accrual and payout provisions, and retiree health. Then the supplemental pay categories in their own right: education and certification pay, specialty and hazard assignment pay, longevity, and shift differential. A department can be competitive on salary and lose candidates on any one of these.
Treat the retirement system as its own domain
Plan type and governance, employee and employer contribution rates and their trajectory, vesting and eligibility, benefit multiplier and averaging period, cost-of-living provisions, deferred retirement option programs, funded position on both market and actuarial bases, and the trend in unfunded liability. Plan design is then benchmarked against peer systems and against whichever employer is competing hardest for the same candidates.
Integrate, then compute take-home pay as well
Base salary, employer benefit contributions at a declared coverage tier, employer retirement contributions, and realistically attained incentive pay are combined at entry and at five, ten, fifteen, and twenty years, then rolled forward into cumulative career value. We also compute take-home pay, because a high employee pension contribution can reverse a favorable total compensation ranking. An agency can be paying above market and still lose the candidate who compared deposits.
Analyze retention as the consequence of all of it
Multi-year separation data split into resignations, retirements, and other departures, with attrition measured against starting strength; vacancy rate by rank; recruitment funnel conversion; average tenure at voluntary resignation; and the career decision points where risk concentrates, commonly around years five, seven, and ten. Replacement cost is then modeled from academy tuition, cadet salary, field training overtime, the reduced productivity of both trainee and trainer, and time to competency. That figure becomes the denominator for the return on any retention investment.
Recommend structure, not only amounts
Step plan design or redesign, decompression at the specific pinch points identified, promotional differential targets, and a deliberate choice between percentage-based and flat-dollar treatment for each incentive component, since the two behave very differently across a career and across a budget. Where the gap to a competing employer cannot be closed by base pay at all, we say so and recommend targeted measures instead.
Cost it, phase it, and check internal equity
Per-position and program-level costs, phased across multiple budget cycles and sequenced against collective bargaining expiry dates so that recommendations arrive when they can actually be acted on. Every recommendation is checked against other city classifications for internal equity, and costs are presented net of projected retention savings rather than as a gross figure that ignores what turnover is already costing.
Leave behind a mechanism, not just a report
An annual benchmark refresh, total compensation statements that show employees and candidates the full value of the package rather than the salary line alone, and a monitoring approach that flags movement in the peer set. Compensation position erodes quietly when competitors adjust and nobody is watching.
What we have found doing this work
Patterns that recur across compensation engagements.
Findings from individual studies belong to the clients who commissioned them. These are the structural patterns we see often enough to look for deliberately.
The gap opens at year ten
Agencies competitive at entry frequently fall away in the second decade, because a flat structure with no meaningful step progression above the rank of officer has nothing left to offer someone who does not want promotion. That is also the point at which an officer is most expensive to replace.
Take-home can invert the ranking
A department can sit above the median on total compensation and below it on what actually reaches the employee’s account, once employee pension contributions are applied. Candidates compare deposits, so we report both.
Compression stops promotion
Where the differential between a senior officer at top-out and a newly promoted sergeant falls below roughly fifteen percent, qualified people decline promotion, and the supervisory bench thins without a single resignation appearing in the turnover figures.
Overtime masks a vacancy problem
Separating vacancy-driven overtime from the overtime a schedule generates by design usually shows that a department is already paying for the positions it has been told it cannot afford, at a premium rate and with a fatigue cost attached.
Small components carry weight
Shift differential, longevity, and certification pay are often set decades ago and never revisited. They are inexpensive to correct relative to base pay and are frequently where an agency is furthest from its market.
Sometimes parity is not available
Against a federal agency or a much larger metropolitan employer, no realistic increase reaches parity. Saying so, and redirecting the effort toward schedule, assignment, development, and quality of life, is more useful than recommending a raise that will not work.
Scope
What a compensation engagement covers
Sworn police and fire
Officer through executive command, and firefighter through chief officer, including the schedule-driven normalization that fire comparison requires.
Communications and civilian
Dispatchers and call takers, benchmarked against regional communications centers rather than against general municipal classifications, together with records, evidence, and other civilian public safety roles.
Corrections
Staffing analysis and compensation studies for jails, detention facilities, and sheriff’s corrections divisions, led by our justice system specialist.
Classification and pay plan design
Building a step plan from nothing for a newly formed department, or rebuilding one that has compressed, flattened, or drifted from the market over successive across-the-board increases.
Commissioned together
Staffing and compensation answer each other
A vacancy problem is often a pay problem, and a pay recommendation is only affordable if the staffing figure behind it is right. The two studies are frequently run as one engagement, which is cheaper than commissioning them separately and avoids two consultants arriving at different headcounts.
Start the conversation
Tell us what your agency is facing.
Whether you are preparing a budget request, responding to a growth pressure, or standing at the beginning of a facility project, a short conversation is usually enough to tell you whether a study is the right next step, and what it would involve.