Chicago City Employee Roster: 31,768 Positions, By The Numbers

More than half of Chicago’s city-government roster sits in two departments: the Police Department’s 12,181 positions and the Fire Department’s 4,779 together make up 16,960 of the 31,768 positions in the city’s own employee file — 53 percent. The single most common job title in city government is Police Officer, with 7,855 positions, 24.7 percent of the entire roster. The file spreads the rest across 37 more departments and 1,197 distinct titles, and this page reads all of it — who is salaried and who is hourly, where part-time work actually exists, and the one corner of the roster listed at $4.73 an hour. It counts positions, names no one, and ranks no individual’s pay.

Current Employee Names, Salaries, and Position Titles, Chicago data portal · file refreshed August 14, 2026; retrieved the same day · 31,768 positions across 39 departments

Reading the roster

The roster dataset lists the city’s current employees one row at a time, each row carrying a department, job title, full- or part-time flag, and either an annual salary or an hourly wage with typical weekly hours. Every salaried row in the file carries its salary and every hourly row its rate; exactly two rows lack the full-or-part-time flag. The file also carries each employee’s name, and it holds 350 more rows than it has distinct name strings — a gap the file cannot split between people who share a name and one person holding two positions — so this page adopts a stated convention: each row counts as one position, and every figure here counts rows, never people. By this site’s own rule it prints no employee’s name. One more boundary: the salary column is the annual salary the file attaches to the row, not what anyone was actually paid — overtime and other premiums live in the payment records, which our overtime analysis reads separately.

Where the positions sit

Largest departments by positionspositions

Chicago Police Department12,181
Chicago Fire Department4,779
Water Management2,053
Aviation1,978
Streets and Sanitation1,973
Transportation1,274
Chicago Public Library1,088
Emergency Management and Communications878

The roster names 39 departments, but the weight sits at the top: the twelve largest hold 28,799 of the 31,768 positions — 90.7 percent — and the police department alone holds 38 percent, more than the next five departments combined. At the other end sit single-digit offices: the Board of Ethics has seven positions, the Chicago Police Board two, and the License Appeal Commission is one position in its entirety. After the police officers themselves, the most common titles are Firefighter-EMT (1,665), Sergeant (1,295), Police Officer assigned as detective (1,143), and Motor Truck Driver (954).

Salaried and hourly are different rosters

The file splits 24,833 salaried positions from 6,935 hourly ones, and the two look like different rosters. On the salaried side, the median listed salary is $115,158, three-quarters of salaried positions (18,687) carry $100,000 or more, and the middle 80 percent runs from $74,526 to $151,338. Among the biggest departments, the highest median belongs to Buildings — $136,656 across a department that is almost entirely salaried inspectors and plan examiners — ahead of Fire at $122,376, Transportation at $121,914, and Police at $115,158; Finance sits at $81,888 and the Library at $88,524. Medians here are of salaried positions only.

The hourly positions sit in different departments almost entirely. Five of the city’s ten largest are hourly-majority: Streets and Sanitation (84 percent of its 1,973 positions), Fleet and Facility Management (81 percent), Water Management (80 percent), Transportation (69 percent), and Aviation (51 percent) — the departments of motor truck drivers, sanitation laborers, construction laborers, and automotive machinists. The median wage across all 6,935 hourly positions is $50.23 an hour. This page never converts hourly pay into an annual figure: the file records a rate and typical weekly hours, not hours worked.

Part-time barely exists

Of 31,768 positions, 942 are flagged part-time — 3.0 percent — and every one of them is hourly, 928 of them at a typical 20 hours a week. They cluster in four places: the Chicago Public Library holds 308 (183 of them the Library Page title), Family and Support Services 231, Emergency Management and Communications 196 — every one of those 196 the same title, Traffic Control Aide — and City Council offices 93. Outside those 942, every row that carries the flag is marked full-time; two rows carry no flag at all.

The $4.73 corner of the roster

The lowest hourly figure in the file is $4.73, attached to exactly 171 rows — all part-time at 20 typical hours, all in the Department of Family and Support Services, under two titles: Foster Grandparent (112) and Senior Companion (59). Those titles match AmeriCorps Seniors’ federal Foster Grandparent and Senior Companion programs, which pay hourly stipends to volunteers 55 and older rather than wages — per AmeriCorps, which raised the stipend to $4.00 an hour in 2020. The roster records these positions as hourly city employees at $4.73 and offers no further explanation; beyond noting the titles’ match, neither does this page.

Known limits

This is a snapshot of a live file — the roster as it stood on August 14, 2026 — with no history: it cannot say who was hired when, what any position paid last year, or how headcounts have moved. It counts positions, not people, for the name-repeat reason above. Salary figures are the file’s listed annual salaries and hourly figures are listed wages, not earnings — what was actually paid, including overtime, lives in the city’s payment records, not here. Department salary medians cover salaried positions only, and hourly pay is never annualized. The file publishes employee names; this site’s own rule, not the file’s, is that no name appears on this page.

Sources Current Employee Names, Salaries, and Position Titles (xzkq-xp2w, 31,768 rows, file refreshed August 14, 2026), retrieved August 14, 2026. Program identification for two titles: AmeriCorps.
Counting One row is one position, and every figure counts positions. Salary medians and percentiles cover the 24,833 salaried positions; hourly medians cover the 6,935 hourly positions; the two are never combined and hourly pay is never converted to an annual figure. Department medians are of that department’s salaried positions. The two rows lacking a full-or-part-time flag are counted as salaried (which they are) and as neither full- nor part-time.
Names The file’s name column is never retrieved by our fetch: the one figure that concerns it — 31,418 distinct name strings against 31,768 rows — was computed server-side as a count. No name reached our records, and none appears here.

Computed by KCM Desk from records retrieved August 14, 2026. If you spot an error, corrections come first.