Cobb County Sheriff's Office entry pay

What Cobb County says about itself

The Cobb County Sheriff's Office is committed to giving the most professional, fair, and impartial law enforcement and detention operations possible while ensuring accountability, respect, and community-oriented partnership.

What Cobb County does

The Cobb County Sheriff's Office polices the county north-west of Atlanta from Marietta, alongside a separate Cobb County Police Department that handles general patrol - the division of labor common to metropolitan Georgia. Its own account of what it does is a constitutional list: jail operations, court security, criminal warrant execution, civil process service, mental health transports, forgery and fraud investigation, and fugitive investigation and apprehension. The Adult Detention Center is the largest of its four divisions; Uniform Field Operations holds the canine team, the civil section, court security, the Fugitive Apprehension and Support Team, SWAT and the warrant section. The office handles over 28,000 criminal warrants and about 750,000 court security screenings a year, and by statute the Sheriff is responsible for the security of the county's court facilities. Sheriff Craig Owens leads it.

Where the figure comes from

Checked 22 September 2026. Cobb County Sheriff's Office, Recruitment, under Salary: "Deputy Sheriff Starting Pay $54,000 (annually based up 12 hour shifts) Effective July 7, 2024"; and in the Deputy Sheriff posting on the same page, "Full-Time - $54,000.00 - $70,840.00 Annually" with "Base Pay for Deputy Sheriff I is $54,000.00 per year (18-month working test period)." — open the source document
$54,000 is printed as an annual by the Sheriff's Office and needs no conversion - and note what the annual assumes: "annually based up 12 hour shifts", so it is built on the 2,184-hour year of a twelve-hour rotation rather than a 2,080-hour one. THE FLOOR IS NAMED, NOT INFERRED. The posting gives the band $54,000 to $70,840 and then says in its own sentence which end is the start: "Base Pay for Deputy Sheriff I is $54,000.00 per year". NO CADET OR RECRUIT CLASS EXISTS HERE TO COMPETE WITH IT. Cobb hires uncertified and sends them to the academy afterwards - the minimum qualification is a high school diploma or GED "and ability to graduate from the POST academy within 12 months" - so certification is a condition of staying, not a rate below this one, and academy status never disqualifies. THE LATERAL SIDE CONFIRMS IT FROM ABOVE: lateral entry is open only to applicants who "must have served a minimum of two years consecutive service in a full-time sworn position", and those applicants "will be given credit for years of service and placed accordingly in the Step in Grade pay scale". So prior sworn service buys steps and Deputy Sheriff I is what is left for someone with none. The eighteen-month working test period runs on the same rate, not a lower one. Excluded from the figure, all of them named on the page: a $4,000 hiring incentive "available for a limited time" and an $8,000 lateral incentive, shift differentials of $0.50 evening and $1.00 for the other night tour, detention incentive pay of $1.30 an hour for sworn and civilian staff alike, and education incentives of $1,000 for an Associate's, $2,000 for a Bachelor's and $3,000 for a Master's, paid quarterly. Deputy Sheriff III is $1.40 an hour above Deputy Sheriff II and comes after four continuous years.
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 Cobb 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 Cobb County Sheriff's Office officer make?

Cobb County Sheriff's Office starts a new officer on $54,000 a year, about $25.96 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 Cobb County Sheriff's Office, Recruitment, under Salary: "Deputy Sheriff Starting Pay $54,000 (annually based up 12 hour shifts) Effective July 7, 2024"; and in the Deputy Sheriff posting on the same page, "Full-Time - $54,000.00 - $70,840.00 Annually" with "Base Pay for Deputy Sheriff I is $54,000.00 per year (18-month working test period).".

Is that good pay for a police officer in Georgia?

It ranks #51 of 80 agencies we have verified in Georgia — 29 pay less, 50 pay more in the state — and #1,916 of 2,288 nationally. Against the national median it is $12,685 below, and against other county agencies $9,560 below.

The agencies either side of it