Vestavia Hills Police Department entry pay

What Vestavia Hills says about itself

VHPD serves a population of nearly 40,000 residents, with 109 sworn officers and three civilian employees organized into task specific units to provide the best service to our citizens.

What Vestavia Hills does

The Vestavia Hills Police Department is the municipal police agency for the city of Vestavia Hills, Alabama, a suburb in the Birmingham metropolitan area. It is a merit-system agency of the Personnel Board of Jefferson County, which classifies its sworn ranks and publishes the city's salary schedule. The department is organized into task-specific units and runs a paramilitary rank structure from chief of police down through corporals and officers.

Where the figure comes from

Checked 21 September 2026. The City of Vestavia Hills Salary Schedule, published by the Personnel Board of Jefferson County, prints the Grade 19 entry step on two stacked lines reading "19 hourly 24.01 25.21 26.47 27.80 29.19 30.65 32.18 33.79 35.48 37.25 39.11 41.07 43.12" and "annually 49,940.80 52,436.80 55,057.60 57,824.00 60,715.20 63,752.00 66,934.40 70,283.20 73,798.40 77,480.00 81,348.80 85,425.60 89,689.60", so the first step of Grade 19 is $24.01 per hour and $49,940.80 per year. — open the source document
This is the Step 1 (entry) rate of Grade 19 on the City of Vestavia Hills Salary Schedule, whose page header reads "CITY OF VESTAVIA HILLS / SALARY SCHEDULE / (Annual Hours 2080) / Effective 10/01/2025 / Acknowledged by Personnel Board 09/23/2025". The figure therefore takes effect 1 October 2025 and was acknowledged by the Personnel Board of Jefferson County on 23 September 2025. Vestavia Hills is a merit-system jurisdiction of the Personnel Board of Jefferson County, and the City's own FAQ page directs applicants to that Board, so the Board publishes a separate schedule per member jurisdiction; the file path segment 14VH is the Vestavia Hills jurisdiction code, and this schedule is Vestavia's own, not a county-wide or Board-wide table. The link from job title to money runs through the Board's class specification for the job, which states verbatim "Class Title: Police Officer" / "Class Number: 06031" / "Grade: 19"; a reader can follow Police Officer to class 06031, class 06031 to Grade 19, and Grade 19 to the $49,940.80 first step. The figure chosen is the ENTRY rate because Grade 19 Step 1 is the lowest cell on the ladder for the sworn class, and because the gate immediately above it is a promotion requiring prior sworn service rather than a step increase: the next class up, Police Corporal, is class number 06032 at Grade 20, and its specification requires that a candidate "currently be employed as a Police Officer" with at least two years total experience as a sworn officer and adds lead-worker duties directing subordinate officers. Nothing below Grade 19 in this schedule is a sworn police class, so no cadet, recruit or trainee rate was used. The pay basis is stated by the document itself rather than inferred: the header carries "(Annual Hours 2080)", and the schedule prints the hourly and the annual figures side by side, so no annualization was performed by me; $24.01 x 2080 = $49,940.80 exactly, which reproduces the printed annual figure and confirms the basis. Two things could mislead a reader. First, and most important, the figure supplied to me for this row was $49,899.20 annual / $23.99 hourly, and that figure is NOT what the document now reads: the strings 23.99 and 49,899.20 do not appear anywhere in this schedule, and the Grade 19 first step reads 24.01 / 49,940.80 at the very effective date (10/01/2025) that the supplied figure was attributed to. The supplied pair is internally consistent on its own ($23.99 x 2080 = $49,899.20), so it is most likely a genuine figure from a superseded schedule that was mislabelled with the 10/01/2025 date; either way the live document does not support it, and the corrected figure is published here. Second, this schedule is an overlapping step matrix in which each grade's first step equals the previous grade's second step (Grade 18 Step 1 is 22.87 and Grade 18 Step 2 is 24.01, which is Grade 19 Step 1), so a reader or an extraction tool that slips by one row will silently land on a neighbouring grade and still see a plausible number; the Grade 18/19/20 rows were read together here specifically to confirm the alignment. Third, a separate Vestavia Hills executive salary schedule exists at the same site and does not contain this class.
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 Vestavia Hills 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 Vestavia Hills Police Department officer make?

Vestavia Hills Police Department starts a new officer on $49,941 a year, about $24.01 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 The City of Vestavia Hills Salary Schedule, published by the Personnel Board of Jefferson County, prints the Grade 19 entry step on two stacked lines reading "19 hourly 24.01 25.21 26.47 27.80 29.19 30.65 32.18 33.79 35.48 37.25 39.11 41.07 43.12" and "annually 49,940.80 52,436.80 55,057.60 57,824.00 60,715.20 63,752.00 66,934.40 70,283.20 73,798.40 77,480.00 81,348.80 85,425.60 89,689.60", so the first step of Grade 19 is $24.01 per hour and $49,940.80 per year..

Is that good pay for a police officer in Alabama?

It ranks #18 of 35 agencies we have verified in Alabama — 17 pay less, 17 pay more in the state — and #2,088 of 2,288 nationally. Against the national median it is $16,744 below, and against other municipal agencies $18,199 below.

The agencies either side of it