Fairbanks Police Department entry pay

What Fairbanks says about itself

We remain committed to increasing our capabilities through training, equipping and professional development to meet the challenges that arise in our community.

What Fairbanks does

The Fairbanks Police Department is the city force for Fairbanks, the largest city in interior Alaska, working out of 911 Cushman Street. It dates to 1904, beginning with the appointment of Pat Whaler as Town Constable and, shortly after, Edgar Wickersham as the first Chief of Police; the department lost Chief Alvin Miller, shot and killed answering a call, in 1908. Dorotha Hilliard became its first female officer in the mid-twentieth century, and the building of the Alaska Pipeline in the 1970s brought a surge of workers and the problems that came with them. From the 1980s the department established its specialist units - K9, Traffic, SWAT and Drug - and it says it was the first department in Alaska to roll out body-worn cameras. It runs a detective division, K-9 officers, traffic and narcotics, with drones used in search and rescue and in accident and crime scene reconstruction, robots for surveillance in dangerous situations, and patrol cars carrying computer-aided dispatch, radar, cameras and ballistic door panels; every officer is in the take-home car programme. Officers receive regular Crisis Intervention Team training and the department helped establish the Crisis Now model in Fairbanks, with its deputy chief lobbying the legislature for a local crisis stabilisation center. Patrol officers work four ten-hour days. The Fairbanks Emergency Communications Center, on the second floor of the same building, dispatches for the department around the clock. The department was the subject of A&E's series Alaska PD.

Where the figure comes from

Checked 10 September 2026. Fairbanks Police Department, City of Fairbanks — published wage scale, Step 1 (Recruit Officer) $38.00 per hour — open the source document
Read 10 September 2026 from the department's own site, page last modified 4 June 2026. The department publishes its wage scale in its own words: Step 1 (Recruit Officer) $38.00, Step 5 $42.77, Step 10 $49.57, Step 15 $54.72, Step 20 (Top Step) $60.41. The annual figure is the Step 1 rate over 2,080 hours and nothing else - the department publishes an hourly rate and no annual one, so the multiplication is the only arithmetic applied. THE ENTRY TEST IS SETTLED FROM BOTH SIDES: Step 1 is named Recruit Officer, and the department states that for laterals the step they come in at is around the number of full-time years of law enforcement experience they hold, so the published Step 1 is by construction the no-experience rate. New recruits are sent to the four-month police academy in Sitka; out-of-state laterals attend a two-week recertification academy within a year of hire under Alaska Police Standards Council reciprocity. Minimum age 21, US citizen or national. Steps 5 to 20 are excluded, as are the shift differentials of 5 per cent for swing and 10 per cent for mid shift, the $20,000 recruit hiring bonus paid in two halves at the end of field training and at 24 months, the $60,000 lateral bonus, and the $10,000 a year supplemental retirement benefit created by Fairbanks City Council ordinance 6253 in June 2023, which sits on top of PERS Tier 4.
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 Fairbanks 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 Fairbanks Police Department officer make?

Fairbanks Police Department starts a new officer on $79,040 a year, about $38.00 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 Fairbanks Police Department, City of Fairbanks — published wage scale, Step 1 (Recruit Officer) $38.00 per hour.

Is that good pay for a police officer in Alaska?

It ranks #9 of 15 agencies we have verified in Alaska — 6 pay less, 8 pay more in the state — and #521 of 2,288 nationally. Against the national median it is $12,355 above, and against other municipal agencies $10,900 above.

The agencies either side of it