If you’re a government employee, your salary usually depends on your position and years worked. But it also depends heavily on the state in which you live. Each pair of maps illustrates average annual salaries (extrapolated from one month of full-time payroll in March, 2012) for a specific government function; state government salaries (left-hand maps) are compared to local government salaries (right-hand maps). The scale applies to all maps, so any map can be compared to any other.

Some of the differences are striking because the roles are fundamentally different. For example, in education, most local government employees are grade school teachers, whereas state employees are university professors. Others may be due to how governments allocate their resources or emphasize the importance of a given function. For example, Nevada seems to fund local parks more heavily than other states. Perhaps it’s time for Leslie Knope to leave Pawnee…

Data source: https://www.census.gov/govs/apes/