20 Port Authority Workers Make Over $400K Including 17 Cops

Overtime at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is not an aberration that flared up in one bad budget year — it is a structural feature of how the agency pays its workforce, one that outside auditors have been documenting, and criticizing, for well over a decade.

Key Points

Twenty Port Authority employees, seventeen of them police officers, each collected more than $400,000 in total pay, as the agency’s overall payroll climbed past $1.2 billion.
Overtime hours in 2025 ran 18% above the agency’s own plan, a gap PANYNJ attributes largely to staffing needs on its $30 billion-plus capital construction program.
More than 300 workers, including roughly 189 police officers, took home six-figure sums in overtime pay alone last year.
A 2018 New York State Comptroller audit found the agency had a documented history of failing to manage and control overtime spending, including transactions lacking proper prior approval.
The pattern is remarkably consistent going back to at least 2011, when a state audit famously observed that overtime “flows like water” through the agency.

What the Latest Payroll Data Shows

The headline figures are straightforward and drawn from the agency’s own disclosures. Twenty Port Authority employees cleared $400,000 in total compensation last year, and seventeen of them wear the badge of the Port Authority Police Department. Eight of the agency’s highest earners collected more than $200,000 in overtime pay alone, on top of base salary. Zoom out from the top tier and the pattern widens rather than narrows: 323 employees collected six-figure overtime sums, including roughly 189 police officers, according to payroll records reviewed by the New York Post. Total agency payroll rose 5% year over year, crossing $1.2 billion.

This is not a one-year spike. The Empire Center’s review of 2024 payroll data found eleven employees over the $400,000 threshold and 316 employees who collected more than $100,000 in overtime alone, with six of the top overtime earners exceeding $200,000. A year before that, the Empire Center reported average pay across the agency rising as overtime surged, calling it a driver that had “wiped out” projected savings elsewhere in the budget. The names and exact dollar figures shift from year to year; the shape of the story does not.

Why Overtime Runs So High: The Mechanism

Understanding why this keeps happening requires understanding how Port Authority compensation is actually built. Base salary is only the floor. On top of it sit longevity payments, differential pay for unusual shifts, and overtime calculated at time-and-a-half or better under union contracts covering police and many civilian trades. Because the Port Authority runs airports, bridges, tunnels, PATH rail service, and bus terminals around the clock, staffing gaps — from vacancies, injury leave, security details, or construction phasing — get filled with overtime rather than new hires, since adding headcount carries long-term pension and benefit liabilities that overtime, on paper, does not.

The agency’s own transparency reporting confirms the mechanism is active right now: total overtime hours through the fourth quarter of 2025 ran 18% above plan, which PANYNJ attributes to “support for essential capital projects” tied to its 2017–2025 Capital Plan, including more than $30 billion in redevelopment work across its facilities. That is the agency’s explicit defense — overtime is the price of building and rebuilding a regional transportation system while keeping it running simultaneously. It is a real cost driver. It is also, critics note, a cost driver the agency has repeatedly been told it does not manage well.

A Documented Pattern Stretching Back More Than a Decade

The paper trail here is unusually long for a public-payroll story. A 2011 state comptroller audit concluded that overtime “flows like water” at the Port Authority. A follow-up audit, published by the Office of the State Comptroller, was blunter still: it found the agency “did not manage and control its employee overtime cost” and identified overtime transactions that lacked proper prior approvals and justification. Between 2011 and 2013 alone, base salary costs totaled $1.71 billion against $316.3 million in overtime. By 2014, Port Authority police officers earning top-tier base pay of $90,000 were averaging more than $153,000 in total compensation once overtime, longevity, and unusual-hours pay were added in.

The years since have produced a near-annual ritual of new disclosures with the same underlying arithmetic. In 2016, at least three officers topped $300,000 through overtime that tripled their base pay. By 2020, Streetsblog reported that 71% of police department employees earned six-figure salaries and 124 collected at least $100,000 in overtime alone, with total police overtime payments up $14 million from the prior year; that same year, one Port Authority officer was reported to be earning more in total compensation than the President of the United States. In 2023, more than 200 officers again collected six-figure overtime sums, with one exceeding $400,000 in total pay. Each cycle draws fresh outrage; each cycle resolves without structural change to the underlying overtime dependency.

Where the Genuine Disagreement Lies

The facts of who got paid what are not seriously contested — they come from the agency’s own payroll disclosures, posted publicly through SeeThroughNY and PANYNJ’s transparency portal. The disagreement is about interpretation. Agency officials and defenders of the police overtime structure point to genuine operational realities: a 24/7 security and infrastructure mission, a historic capital construction program, and union contract terms that predate current management. Critics — including successive state auditors, fiscal watchdogs like the Empire Center, and taxpayer advocates — counter that the recurrence of the same findings across three different comptroller-level reviews spanning more than a decade suggests a management failure rather than an unavoidable operational cost. Both claims can be true at once: capital construction genuinely requires extra coverage, and the agency has genuinely, repeatedly failed to control how that coverage gets paid for.

This is absolute theft.
Twenty Port Authority workers — 17 of them cops — walked away with over $400,000 each last year. One lieutenant alone pulled in $466,775. Another guy in maintenance cleared $421,000. And 94 people under the actual boss made more than he did

How? Overtime.… pic.twitter.com/kjAcKyDUAn

— Keith Ainsworth (@AinsworthKeith) August 10, 2026

What It Means for Taxpayers and Riders Going Forward

The Port Authority is a self-funded bistate authority financed primarily through tolls, fares, and airport fees rather than direct tax appropriations, which is why its payroll draws intense scrutiny every time it appears in transparency data — every dollar spent on overtime is a dollar that would otherwise go toward toll relief, fare stability, or the capital projects the agency cites as justification for the overtime in the first place. Public reaction to the latest disclosures has been sharp, with critics online framing the numbers as evidence of public-sector compensation excess rather than legitimate operational necessity. Given the documented, decade-plus history of comptroller findings on inadequate overtime controls, the burden of proof now sits squarely with agency management to show that current spending reflects genuine capital-project staffing needs rather than the same unmanaged overtime culture regulators have flagged since 2011.