The number of six-figure earners last year was about 13 percent higher than in 2016, when about 1,820 collected $100,000 or more, and it was higher than in every other year since 2013, the earliest year of readily available data.

About 2,065 MBTA workers collected six-figure sums last year, representing nearly one-third of everyone who received a paycheck from the agency during 2017.

The number of Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority workers earning $100,000 or more in 2017 climbed to the highest level seen in recent years, according to figures released by the agency Friday.

Even in 2015, when a record-breaking winter drastically drove up overtime costs, the number of T workers who collected six-figure compensation was lower, at about 1,975.


MBTA spokesman Joe Pesaturo attributed the increasing spending costs to the reduced size of the T’s staff, along with “the elevated level” of construction work on the system last year.

It’s important to note that the data released Friday in response to a public records request from the Globe only showed employees’ base pay and the total amount of money they took home during the year. It didn’t include more detailed breakdowns of other types of compensation, such as overtime pay, even though the Globe’s records request specifically asked for those figures.

The number of T workers who earned $150,000 or more also rose — from 126 in 2016 to 210 last year, a 67 percent jump. And the number of employees who collected $200,000 or more tripled from just six in 2016 to 18 last year.

“The staggering growth in the number of high-dollar staff is unsustainable and especially troubling with fare hikes on the horizon,” said Mary Connaughton, director of government transparency at the Pioneer Institute, a nonprofit think tank that supports limited government.

The highest-paid worker during 2017 was Perry Yee, a foreman in the wire department, who made $270,634, far above his base salary of $115,377. Yee was also the highest-paid worker in 2016, when he collected $227,022.


Pesaturo said Yee is an electrical foreman “who last year played a very important role in advancing a number of critical projects,” including on the Commonwealth Avenue and Longfellow bridges and winter resiliency work. The wire department, he said, is responsible “for maintaining, replacing, and repairing” electrical cables and wires systemwide.

Meanwhile, the average pay for T workers was about $86,180 in 2017, up by about 8 percent from the year before.

Overall, however, the agency’s payroll spending actually dropped in 2017. That’s because the size of the T’s staff shrunk. The agency doled out a total of $553.2 million in pay last year, about 1.8 percent less than it did in 2016 and lower than the totals it spent in the two previous years.

“Through attrition and retirements, the number of employees was reduced last year,” Pesaturo said. “At the direction of the MBTA Control Board, T management launched a concerted effort to keep the rate of cost growth at or below the rate of revenue growth.”

But fewer people meant more overtime. On top of that, Pesaturo said there were 118 cases last year in which the agency had to deploy buses to replace rail service so crews could work on infrastructure upgrades and repairs, adding to payroll costs.

David Tuerck, a Suffolk University economics professor and president of the Beacon Hill Institute, a conservative research center, said: “It looks to me like what they’re doing is allowing some attrition to take place to allow them to pay their workers substantially more,” Tuerck said. “And I don’t know how that benefits the riders of the MBTA.”


Matt Rocheleau can be reached at matthew.rocheleau@globe.com.