The Republic | azcentral.com

When we launched AZ Data Central, the idea was to bring you more useful information for how you live.

Now we're launching one of our biggest data sets yet: salary information for more than 154,000 public employees at the state, county and local level across Arizona, including:

Arizona state employees.

Arizona State University, University of Arizona and Northern Arizona University salaries.

Maricopa County and other counties.

Phoenix, Tucson, Mesa, Scottsdale, Glendale, Tempe, Chandler and other cities, including their police and fire departments.

We're doing it because personnel costs are the biggest expenditures for taxpayer-funded agencies. As salary expenses increase, that's less of your tax money left over for the services you need. And if you're a public employee, you deserve to know whether your employer is treating you and your colleagues fairly.

You've told us you want to know how your tax dollars are spent. Now you will.

SEE OUR DATABASE: Look up salaries for 154,000 public employees in Arizona

These employees are public employees, and their salaries are public record. But that doesn't mean this information is always easy to find.

Our data team spent months submitting public records requests, compiling the results and verifying the information, which more than 20 public agencies record in myriad and sometimes messy ways.

INFO INCORRECT? Let your employer know, then notify us by filling out our form

The University of Arizona released salary information but refused to release its overtime pay — even though other universities and public agencies did so — until being pressured by repeated requests under A.R.S. 39-121, the Arizona Public Records Law.

The city of Tucson didn't provide a list of regular total pay; it sent eight columns of complex information and left the pay calculations to us.

Indeed, throughout this database, you'll see full disclosure about how we obtained or calculated the information we got. If you're a public employee, and you think our data has a discrepancy, this might be why:

In some cases, agencies provided annual salary. But in other cases, they provided annual base pay — the actual dollars earned, which might be more or less than regular salary, depending on various factors. We published one or the other, depending on what the government agency provided.

In some cases, agencies provided hourly pay. In other cases, we had to calculate the hourly rate based on annual pay. And in some cases, we had to calculate the annual pay based on the hourly rate.

Most of the salary data is for the 2018 fiscal year, which ended in the middle of 2018. Since then, some of these employees have left their jobs. (This includes a few high-profile sports coaches.) You'll still see them in the database. Others have gotten pay raises in fiscal 2019, but the database only shows their 2018 pay for now.

In some cases, top officials are paid by more than one agency. ASU's president is paid both by the university and by a private foundation. Some people's jobs are endowed by private contributions even though they work for public agencies. In every case, we listed the information provided, or a calculation based on that information.

If you think there's an error, you can talk to us about it here.

This compilation of salaries is the largest and most complete one ever made publicly available in Arizona. And the research to determine accurate hourly and annual information and disclose that to you is as thorough as any public salary database in the country.

It only serves the public if it's useful, and if you get to explore it for yourself.

Are your coworkers paid fairly? Is your payroll information different from what's showing up on your paycheck? Are there problems inside the public agency where you work? If so, send us a tip. Public money and public information work better when everybody can see and understand it. Start exploring now at data.azcentral.com.