You read that headline right. One NYC city worker racked up more than 18,000 hours of paid time in four years — something I discovered by accident at the School of Data conference during NYC Open Data Week.

During a midday session, I sat down with The Sunlight Foundation to help them catalog NYC’s open data resources. While locating and documenting the city’s payroll data, I decided to poke around. The city’s data portal offers a nice interface where you can see the first few rows data before you download the file.

On a whim, I decided to sort the data according to overtime hours worked. That’s when I found that a city inspector had worked 3,347 hours of overtime in fiscal year 2014. That was on top of 2,085 regular hours, for a total of 5,432 hours in a single year.

Pay Summary for the Prolific Inspector

YEAR BASE PAY REGULAR HOURS OT HOURS OT PAY OTHER PAY 2014 $73362.00 2085.72 3347.50 $179099.31 $17789.72 2015 $78490.00 2085.72 2206.00 $130851.42 $13712.20 2016 $80845.00 2091.42 2330.50 $146736.12 $16129.65 2017 $80845.00 2085.72 1802.25 $120598.68 $15221.20

That figure caught the attention of The New York Daily News in 2014, when the building department explained that the inspector had clocked in many hours working on Hurricane Sandy relief as well as working a lot of weekends and holidays.

“He is an inspector who has made himself incredibly available,” said Buildings Department spokesman Alex Schnell. “He’s made his schedule very flexible.”

What The Daily News didn’t notice is that the city inspector picked up more than 6,000 hours of overtime in the following three years. In total, from fiscal 2014-2017, this worker has taken home more than $950,000 in city pay.

But He Is a SEVERE Outlier

When I initially pointed out this finding, a commenter on reddit/r/nyc declared that this was because city jobs are a racket. But the data doesn’t support that — at least in terms of overtime.

As the chart above shows, the vast majority of NYC city workers work zero overtime. About a quarter of city workers work between 0 and 1,000 hours of overtime, and most of those work between 100 and 500 hours of overtime. Only a tiny fraction — 0.16 percent — worked more than 1,000 hours of overtime in a year.

In fact, between fiscal 2014 and fiscal 2017, city workers have only racked up more than 2,000 hours of overtime 26 times. Three of them were this one inspector.

In terms of simple pay efficiency, this is probably what NYC voters should want to see. But it seems like NYC voters may be getting a bad deal on this one specific worker.