Chatham County Sheriff's Office entry pay

What Chatham County says about itself

The Chatham County Sheriff's Office is a Constitutional Office of the State of Georgia, committed to upholding the law and delivering the highest standard of public safety services.

What Chatham County does

The Chatham County Sheriff's Office serves every municipality and the unincorporated parts of the Georgia coast county that holds Savannah, working from Carl Griffin Drive. It calls itself a constitutional office of the State of Georgia, and its work divides into three: the detention center, court services, and the Street Operations Division, which is responsible for all civil processes, subpoenas and criminal warrants issued by the Recorder's, Probate, Magistrate, State, Juvenile and Superior Courts, along with FIFAs, levies and extraditions. Street Operations runs on 28 full-time staff, including three fugitive-squad investigators and one officer each seconded to the U.S. Marshals' Southeast Fugitive Squad, the Counter Narcotics Team and the DEA regional task force. The office sets out its values as an acrostic on its own name - safety, honour, excellence, reliability, integrity, focus and family - and takes sworn applicants certified or through Georgia's equivalency-of-training route.

Where the figure comes from

Checked 22 September 2026. Chatham County Sheriff's Office, Join Our Team: "Full-time Certified Peace Officer base annual salary - $55,288", printed beneath "Full-time Corrections Officer base annual salary - $47,212", with the line "Hiring certified peace officers (or qualified EOT) to work directly in Street Operations or Court Services*" and the footnote "*Does not exclude shift-work/posts in the detention center." — open the source document
$55,288 is printed as an annual by the office and needs no conversion. The office calls it a BASE salary in its own words, which settles what it excludes. THE UNCERTIFIED ROUTE IS A DIFFERENT JOB, NOT A LOWER DEPUTY RATE. Chatham hires "certified peace officers (or qualified EOT)" into the sworn class - EOT being Georgia's equivalency-of-training route for out-of-state and military officers - so an applicant without certification enters as a Corrections Officer at $47,212 instead. That is the fourth Georgia shape, shared with Floyd, Spalding and Walker: there is no pre-academy deputy wage here to bar, and $55,288 is purely the certified sworn entry. NO MINIMUM YEARS OF SERVICE ARE ASKED - certification, or equivalency, is the whole requirement - so this is the rate for a deputy with no prior service, and the EOT route means an out-of-state officer starts on the same number rather than a higher one. WHAT THIS AGENCY IS, AND IS NOT: Chatham County has three sworn agencies and this is one of them. The Savannah-Chatham Metropolitan Police Department and a separate Chatham County Police Department are the patrol forces; the Sheriff's Office runs the detention center, court services and Street Operations, which is civil process, subpoenas, criminal warrants, FIFAs and levies, and extraditions. The Chatham County Police Department is already on the roster at $56,947, so the two sit within 3% of one another. Excluded: paid on-the-job training, 27 days of accrued leave and 12 holidays in the first year, compensated overtime, county-paid Peace Officer's Annuity and Benefit Fund membership, life and disability cover, uniforms including footwear, and the pension and 457(b).
Entry-level base salary only. Overtime, bonuses, education incentives, shift differentials, locality pay and lateral rates are excluded, so most officers earn more than this.

How this level compares

Where Chatham County sits is partly about the agency and partly about which level of policing it belongs to. The three levels do not pay the same.

How it ranks

Common questions

How much does a Chatham County Sheriff's Office officer make?

Chatham County Sheriff's Office starts a new officer on $55,288 a year, about $26.58 an hour on a 2,080-hour year. That is base salary before overtime, bonuses, education incentives, shift differentials and locality pay, so most serving officers earn more. The figure comes from Chatham County Sheriff's Office, Join Our Team: "Full-time Certified Peace Officer base annual salary - $55,288", printed beneath "Full-time Corrections Officer base annual salary - $47,212", with the line "Hiring certified peace officers (or qualified EOT) to work directly in Street Operations or Court Services*" and the footnote "*Does not exclude shift-work/posts in the detention center.".

Is that good pay for a police officer in Georgia?

It ranks #43 of 80 agencies we have verified in Georgia — 37 pay less, 42 pay more in the state — and #1,832 of 2,288 nationally. Against the national median it is $11,397 below, and against other county agencies $8,272 below.

The agencies either side of it