A paramedic was the highest-paid Baltimore City employee in fiscal year 2024

The Baltimore Sun

March 6, 2025

The top 10 highest-paid Baltimore City employees in fiscal year 2024 all hailed from the city’s fire and police departments, according to data analyzed by The Baltimore Sun.

Most of the top earners took in between $150,000 and $250,000 more than their expected salaries for the fiscal year. The highest-paid employee was a paramedic, who made more than $245,000 beyond his listed salary, for a total income of $358,586.

The city’s police commissioner, Richard Worley, ranked third on the list, taking home just over $320,000 in gross pay last fiscal year, but other highest-paid positions included police lieutenants and sergeants, battalion fire chiefs, firefighters and EMTs. The data comes from the “Baltimore City Employee Salaries” dataset on the city’s Open Baltimore portal. The Baltimore Sun filtered the dataset’s “FiscalYear” column for “FY2024” to focus on the fiscal year ending June 30, 2024, which was the most recent period available.

Overtime payments were the most common reason for the higher-than-expected pay, said Bryan Doherty, a spokesman for Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott.

But other types of payments also contributed to the overages, Doherty said, including out-of-title pay, on-call pay, education incentives, transportation pay, patrol stipends and a cost-of-living pay adjustment.

“Mayor Scott and the entire administration is deeply dedicated to responsible stewardship of the City’s resources,” Doherty wrote. “It is critically important to note the multitude of factors that may contribute to large overtime payment amounts, including staff seniority and efforts to cover the impacts of vacancies in our fire and police departments.”

In most cases, even when a position is vacated, the salary remains in the budget, Doherty said. Therefore, there is funding available for extra overtime payments for remaining staff members to cover vacancies, he said.

“While overtime is necessary in the short term to ensure our communities remain safe, improving recruitment and therefore lowering overtime payments has been a top priority of the administration,” Doherty said. “This is not an issue of overcompensating employees but rather a reflection of the need to ensure necessary coverage of duties and fill critical roles in these public safety departments.”

Josh Fannon, president of the Baltimore Fire Officers Union IAFF Local 964, said the numbers are a “jarring” representation of an overtime epidemic in the city’s fire department, driven by vacancies.

“We’re all firefighters, so we want to help. That’s like a primary characteristic that we all have. So when we see vacancies and the need for the extra hours, we’re stepping up,” Fannon said.

But some will push themselves “beyond a reasonable limit” in service of the department.

“When you look at the top numbers, those are the people who almost never go home,” Fannon said.

The numbers may seem outlandish at first, he said.

“Without any context, you’re a taxpayer and you’re thinking: ‘I think paramedics should make a lot of money, but not that much money,’” Fannon said.

But the reality is that those employees are the ones pushing themselves the hardest, Fannon said, likely at a detriment to their own health.

Almost all of the city’s top 20 earners were police and fire department employees, with one employee coming from the Department of Housing and Community Development.

At No. 21 is City Administrator Faith Leach, who earned close to $272,000 during the fiscal year. By comparison, Scott fell lower on the list, with an income of $206,472.

In recent years, leadership has paid more attention to recruitment, Fannon said. But the effort must be sustained.

The hiring seemed to fall off a cliff in 2019 and 2020, Fannon said, failing to keep pace with attrition, and additional retirements influenced by the coronavirus pandemic.

But in recent years, unlike prior ones, the department seems to have created a running list of candidates that can be contacted when vacancies arise, increased the size and quantity of training classes and “trimmed the fat” from the training program to place members at the department