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Pay Gap Clock
A pay gap written in hours instead of dollars — how much of every shift you work for the difference between two departments.
Entry pay onlyEvery salary here is what an officer is paid on day one, out of the academy — base pay on a 40-hour week, with no overtime, shift differential, specialty or education pay counted. Nobody stays on it.
Cost of living counted separatelyAn adjusted figure is what the published salary is worth at national prices. It is our arithmetic on the employer’s number, not a second salary, and no ranking on this site uses it.Price levels are the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis Regional Price Parities, 2024.
Start typing in both boxes — a department, a county, a state, or an abbreviation such as FHP or LASD.
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How this is worked out
Everything here is built on a 40-hour week, because that is what base pay buys at every agency on this site. It assumes nothing about how you work: an officer on eight-hour days and a trooper on twelves both work the same forty hours, and the gap between two salaries is the same percentage either way.
Take the two published starting salaries and put the lower one over the higher. If one agency starts at $60,000 and the other at $75,000, the first pays 80 per cent of the second. Forty hours multiplied by 80 per cent is 32 hours — the point in the week where the lower-paid officer has earned what the other earns in a full week. The eight hours left over are the gap. The same 20 per cent applied to an hour is 12 minutes, to four weeks is 32 hours, and to a 2,080-hour year is 416 hours. It is one percentage on four yardsticks, not four different findings. Counting the working days it comes to forward from 1 January gives the date.
Nobody is working unpaid. Both officers are paid in full for every hour they work. Pay Gap Clock is a way of feeling the size of a difference that is easy to read past when it is written as a number — the same device the Trades Union Congress has used for years to report the gender pay gap as the date in the year when women stop working for free.
What counts as a big gap
The R Street Institute's 2025 study of the police workforce puts rough numbers on it: officers who are unhappy in the job, or struggling with bills, will move for a 5 per cent raise or less, while officers who are satisfied where they are generally want at least 20 per cent before they will consider leaving. That is why the scale above is marked at those two points. Pay is the most common single reason officers give for resigning, but it is rarely the only one.
This page is for entertainment purposes only. Salaries are what each employer publishes, verified one agency at a time, and are the first rate an officer is paid once out of the academy. Everything here is base pay on a 40-hour week — no overtime, off-duty work or premium pay is counted on either side, so an officer who clears far more than the figure shown is not being contradicted. Price levels are the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis Regional Price Parities for 2024. The adjusted figures are our arithmetic on the published salaries, and no ranking on this site uses them. The career total assumes today's rates and no rises on either side, which will not happen — it is a scale, not a forecast.
The gap is easier to argue with a record
BlueShifts builds your rotation once and keeps it, however long the shift and however the cycle runs — and the off-duty work you pick up around it goes in beside the shifts, with what it paid.
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