Chicago’s overtime bill has fallen two years running: $523.0M in 2023, $510.9M in 2024, $467.7M in 2025 — even as total payroll grew from $3.81B to $4.39B. The number of employees collecting $100,000 or more in overtime pay nearly halved, from 365 to 199. And the bill spreads far wider than the phrase “overtime club” suggests: 24,687 employees drew overtime pay in 2025, the median recipient drew $11,702, and the top 100 together took 2.9 cents of every overtime dollar.
FMPS Payroll Costing dataset, City of Chicago data portal · payroll years 2023–2025 · retrieved August 7, 2026What counts as overtime here
The city’s Employee Payroll Data (FMPS Payroll Costing) file records every payroll amount by employee, pay element, and payroll period. This page sums the five pay elements whose names say overtime: OT 1_5, OT 1_0, OT FLSA (FLSA is the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, the wage-and-hour law), OT 2_0, and SUPERVISORS QUARTERLY OT. Dropping the supervisors’ element, the four-element 2025 total is $453.5M against the five-element $467.7M — the findings hold either way. These are dollars, never hours: the file prices no hourly records. Amounts include debits and credits, and per-employee sums net them; 26 employees netted below zero in 2025 — their dollars stay in the totals, and they are not counted as recipients. The file’s own payroll year, which follows its 24 payroll periods, is the year used throughout, and 2026 sits out as a partial year.
Two portal notices from July 2025, both read for this analysis: the employee identifier column was regenerated — the portal states the new values remain “unique to the employee and consistent throughout the dataset,” which is what per-employee sums here rely on — and a full reload corrected missing and duplicate 2024 records. One more choice, stated plainly: the file names every employee, and this page prints none of the names. Concentration, titles, and departments carry the story without them.
The bill, three years
- 202325,296 employees drew overtime$523.0M13.7% of payroll
- 202426,183 employees drew overtime$510.9M12.3% of payroll
- 202524,687 employees drew overtime$467.7M10.6% of payroll
Overtime’s share of the city’s total payroll went from 13.7 percent in 2023 to 10.6 percent in 2025. The shrinking is sharpest at the top: 365 employees collected $100,000 or more in overtime in 2023, 302 in 2024, 199 in 2025 — and the single largest overtime sum fell from $292,204 to $208,721.
Who sits at the top, by title
The 100 largest overtime sums of 2025 ran from $117,343 to $208,721. Seventy of the hundred were paid through the Chicago Police Department, 17 through the Department of Water Management, and 9 through the Chicago Fire Department. By job title, 32 of the hundred are sergeants and 29 hold a police-officer title — 15 plain, 14 with an assignment the title string names: SWAT, security specialist, detective, canine handler, field training. The largest single sum belongs to a CHIEF OPERATING ENGINEER in the Department of Water Management: $208,721 in overtime pay for the year. Seven of the hundred are ASST CHIEF OPERATING ENGINEER titles in the same department.
Where the money is paid
- Chicago Police Department$250.0M53.5%
- Chicago Fire Department$90.9M19.4%
- Department of Water Management$44.1M9.4%
- Department of Aviation$24.5M5.2%
- Department of Streets and Sanitation$20.8M4.5%
- Department of Fleet and Facility Management$13.5M2.9%
- Office of Emergency Management and Communications$10.3M2.2%
- Chicago Department of Transportation$10.3M2.2%
The Chicago Police Department carries 53 percent of the 2025 overtime bill ($250.0M), the Fire Department 19 percent, Water Management 9 percent. Every other department together holds under a fifth.
Spread across 24,687 employees
Concentration language usually implies a narrow club. Chicago’s overtime is the opposite of one: 24,687 employees drew some overtime in 2025, the median recipient drew $11,702 for the year. The top 100 earners together took 2.9 percent of the money; the top 1 percent of recipients (246 employees) took 6.2 percent. Those shares barely moved across the three years, even as the total fell — the bill shrank without changing shape.
Known limits
The dataset describes itself as a point-in-time extract, provided without audit — not a component of the city’s financial statements. Departments and titles are the budget ordinance’s strings, printed here without their codes. A pay element says what a dollar was for, never when the hours were worked; retroactive and correcting entries land in the payroll period that processed them. Nothing here says whether any overtime hour was necessary, well-managed, or reimbursed by another government — the file records payments, and this page stops where it stops.
- Source City of Chicago Employee Payroll Data (FMPS Payroll Costing) (dawh-m56b), retrieved August 7, 2026; the portal shows rows last updated May 18, 2026, covering payroll years 2023 through a partial 2026.
- Overtime set Sums of the amount column over pay elements OT 1_5, OT 1_0, OT FLSA, OT 2_0, and SUPERVISORS QUARTERLY OT, grouped portal-side; the four-element variant is reported as a sensitivity figure.
- Per-employee figures Grouped by the dataset’s employee identifier within each payroll year; the top-100 and top-1-percent shares divide those employees’ summed overtime by the year’s overtime total. Recipients counted are employees whose netted overtime is above zero.
- Titles and departments Each top-100 employee’s displayed title and department are the ones on their largest overtime records for the year; where an employee moved, smaller assignments are not shown.
Computed by KCM Desk from records retrieved August 7, 2026. If you spot an error, corrections come first.