Tempe Police Department entry pay

What Tempe says about itself

The Tempe Police Department is accredited by the Arizona Law Enforcement Accreditation Program (ALEAP), demonstrating our commitment to professionalism, accountability, and excellence in service.

What Tempe does

The Tempe Police Department serves the city of Tempe, Arizona, a city of about 191,000 residents with a daily service population between 268,000 and 320,000, from a downtown headquarters and substations at Apache and Hardy. Its officers are represented by the Tempe Officers Association under an agreement running to June 2027, which prices them on time milestones from date of hire rather than on academy completion and permits either five eight-hour shifts or four ten-hour shifts in a seven-day week.

Where the figure comes from

Checked 21 September 2026. City of Tempe Human Resources, memorandum to the President of the Tempe Officers Association, "FY 2026/27 Market Study Implementation", effective July 1, 2026 — POLICE OFFICER, DATE OF HIRE, 0.00%, annualized salary $79,977, hourly $38.450481. — open the source document
$79,977 is the City's own annualized salary at DATE OF HIRE and no arithmetic has been applied to it. THE STEPS ABOVE IT ARE TIME-GATED, WHICH IS WHAT MAKES THIS THE ENTRY FIGURE: the memorandum's milestones are "1 Year after Hire" at $81,377, "2 Years after Hire" at $83,818 and so on to "7 Years after Hire" at $107,995, every one of them reached by serving another year. Nothing is gated on finishing an academy, so the date-of-hire rate covers the academy and the first year - the same reading applied to Lexington SC and Opelika AL. TEMPE PRICES NO CADET CLASS AT ALL: neither the market memorandum nor the Tempe Officers Association agreement carries a recruit, cadet or trainee classification, so there is no lower training rate to reject. The City's own wording puts the exclusion beyond doubt: the column is headed "Annualized Salary (not including OT)". THE FIGURE IS DATED BY THE MEMORANDUM ITSELF, effective 1 July 2026. A NOTE FOR THE NEXT READER: this document was reached in the browser pane. The City's personnel-rules page serves its document TITLES in plain HTML but injects the hrefs by JavaScript, and Tempe uses opaque showpublisheddocument paths, so the titles cannot be turned into URLs by hand - which is why three earlier passes called this agency blocked.
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 Tempe 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 Tempe Police Department officer make?

Tempe Police Department starts a new officer on $79,977 a year, about $38.45 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 City of Tempe Human Resources, memorandum to the President of the Tempe Officers Association, "FY 2026/27 Market Study Implementation", effective July 1, 2026 — POLICE OFFICER, DATE OF HIRE, 0.00%, annualized salary $79,977, hourly $38.450481..

Is that good pay for a police officer in Arizona?

It ranks #2 of 36 agencies we have verified in Arizona — 34 pay less, 1 pay more in the state — and #497 of 2,288 nationally. Against the national median it is $13,292 above, and against other municipal agencies $11,837 above.

The agencies either side of it