How an LAFD battalion chief's overtime works out to 20 hours a day

Los Angeles paid one of its fire battalion chiefs $948,271 in 2025. He was the best-paid person in the department, and the year before he was the best-paid employee in the entire city, at $905,060. Most of the money, both years, was overtime.

A caveat before the math. The hours here are modeled, because the city’s payroll file records dollars and not when the chief clocked in or out. But his contract says exactly how hours turn into dollars, and everything below is public record.

He’s a fire battalion chief, a rank the city posted in August 2025 at $210,345 to $247,512 a year. His regular pay, everything he got for scheduled hours, was $279,803 in 2025.
He was paid $948,271 in total, per the City Controller’s payroll file.
$653,485 of that was overtime.
His contract, MOU 22, schedules a battalion chief for nine 24-hour shifts every 27 days. That comes to 2,912 hours a year, and overtime pays time and a half for every hour after.

With some simple arithmetic we can pretty easily calculate what that implies. At 2,912 scheduled hours, $279,803 works out to $96.09 an hour, so time and a half is $144.13. At that rate $653,485 of overtime buys about 4,534 hours, and with the 2,912 he was scheduled for anyway he was on the clock for roughly 7,446 hours, out of the 8,760 in a year.

That’s 85 percent of every hour of 2025. It’s 143 hours a week, or 20.4 hours a day, every day, weekends and holidays included, with about three and a half hours a day left over.

At the contract's overtime rate, he was on the clock for 7,446 of the year's 8,760 hours

Scheduled, 2,912 hoursOvertime, 4,534 hoursOff the clock, 1,314 hours

Source: Basin Data, la-city-payroll, from LA Controller dataset g9h8-fvhu, and MOU 22 (Fire Chief Officers, 2019-2024) for the platoon schedule and the overtime rate. Hours are modeled, not recorded: overtime pay divided by 1.5 times regular pay per scheduled hour, on 2,912 scheduled hours a year. Each square is one hour, in no particular order, because the file doesn't say which hours were which.

Those figures are the generous reading, because his regular pay sits above the top of the posted range and a higher rate means fewer hours for the same money. On the posted top step of $247,512 the year comes to about 8,000 hours, or 22 hours a day. His 2024 pay, $232,603 regular against $644,457 overtime, works out to 22.7.

That is 20 hours a day, every day of the year

ScheduledOvertime

Source: Basin Data, la-city-payroll, from LA Controller dataset g9h8-fvhu, and MOU 22 (Fire Chief Officers, 2019-2024) for the platoon schedule and the overtime rate. Hours are modeled, not recorded: overtime pay divided by 1.5 times regular pay per scheduled hour, on 2,912 scheduled hours a year. Scheduled hours are 2,912 divided by 365. His regular pay sits above the posted range for the rank, and a higher rate means fewer hours for the same money, so the first row is the reading most favorable to him.

The 24-hour shift

Firefighters work 24-hour shifts, and a chief who stays to cover a vacant shift is on the clock for 48 hours, some of them asleep at the station, which is how a year like this can be arithmetically true without anyone working 20 waking hours a day. When CBS Los Angeles covered the chief’s overtime in July 2026, it described him filling vacant positions at an understaffed department. Some hours may have been out of town, since deployments to wildfires elsewhere pay time and a half for every hour, and the state reimburses the city for that time. The file doesn’t say how much of the $653,485 was either, but his overtime was already $456,260 in 2023 and $644,457 in 2024, before the Palisades fire.

On track for a million

By the Controller’s August 18 update, the chief had been paid $610,953 in 2026, including $447,639 of overtime. The rest of the department had drawn 55 percent of its 2025 regular pay by the same point, so the file holds a little over half a year. At that pace he finishes 2026 around $1.1 million.

His pay has doubled since 2022, and nearly all of the growth is overtime

Regular payOvertimeOther pay

Source: Basin Data, la-city-payroll, from LA Controller dataset g9h8-fvhu, calendar-year cash pay for one employee id. 2026 is year to date as of the Controller's August 18 update; the dashed outline is that figure divided by the Fire Department's 2026 share of its 2025 regular pay, 55.5 percent.

He was one of 193 LAFD members paid more than $400,000 in 2025. New York’s fire department, with 19,333 people on its payroll, had nobody above that line.

One battalion chief was paid three times what the mayor of Los Angeles made

Source: Basin Data, la-city-payroll, from LA Controller dataset g9h8-fvhu (calendar-year cash pay, no pension or benefits); New York City payroll k397-673e, fiscal 2025, for FDNY; 3 U.S.C. 102 for the President's salary. The fire chief is 2024 because the office changed hands twice in 2025.

Methods

Pay is calendar-year cash from the Los Angeles City Controller’s payroll file, summed per employee, excluding pension contributions and the $20,215 of health and insurance premiums the city paid for him in 2025. For the 2026 pace, his year-to-date pay is divided by the Fire Department’s 2026 regular pay as a share of its 2025 regular pay, 55.5 percent; 2026 raises push that share slightly high, which makes the pace slightly low. Hours come from dividing overtime pay by 1.5 times the regular rate, with the regular rate taken as regular pay over 2,912 scheduled hours. Time and a half is what MOU 22 pays beyond a platoon schedule and also the federal floor for fire employees past 204 hours in a 27-day period. Chiefs may bank up to 432 hours and cash them out later, which can shift a few hundred hours between years but not create them. MOU 22 as cited is the 2024 to 2028 agreement the City Council adopted in June 2025, and its overtime terms are the same as the 2019 to 2024 agreement’s. New York’s figures use its fiscal 2025 payroll, July 2024 through June 2025.