Ever wonder how much public employees in New Brunswick make? Who earns the biggest salaries or which departments receive the most money?

Earlier this summer, I received a complete list of wages given out to public sector employees for the city of New Brunswick NJ for 2013. Unfortunately, all I could get was a PDF, which aren’t really known for their ability to hold data. After using some new techniques, I put together an extensive Excel file and threw it into Tableau Public to uncover a few interesting insights.



Just a heads up: the PDF was obtained by Charlie Kratovil of New Brunswick Today via an OPRA request. The extraction of the data and the analysis, however, is solely mine. I urge you to visit New Brunswick Today if you haven’t already. They are doing some great hyperlocal journalism that you may be missing out on!

Who earns the biggest salary?

Thomas A Loughlin III, business administrator in the Office of the Business Administrator earns the biggest salary at $174,654. The next highest salary is the Director of Fire Robert C. Rawls at $155,054, and then Police Captains Joseph T Miller, Vincent M Sabo and William R. Milligan each at $141,662.

Hover over the circles on the chart below to view the average salary per job title.

Which departments are paid the most?

The Division of Police was paid a total of $12.4 million last year in wages (the average salary for a lower-level police officer was $90k). The second highest wage earners were those in the Division of Fire, earning $8 million in total wages. In fact, these departments take home about 60% of all city wages (not factoring in total earnings from part-time salaried employees).

Any other interesting tidbits?

A lot of the current employees were hired in and after 1994. The highest paid salaries are for employees for those who were hired in this year, which makes sense.

Oh and here’s a complete list of salaries by department.

Looking for an Excel doc? You can download that right here.