Empire Center<\/a> found the City of Buffalo\u2019s employees ranked first among local governments for average pay at $83,528.<\/p>\nThat average was lifted significantly by police and fire salaries. Nearly half the city\u2019s 2,831 employees worked in the police and fire departments, where they earned far more than their peers \u2014 an average of $111,079 last year.<\/p>\n
However, that figure was substantially lower than police and fire employees in surrounding towns and villages. Public safety workers in Cheektowaga, Amherst and Hamburg \u2014 both the village and the town \u2014 all made more than their counterparts in the city.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Orchard Park\u2019s cops and firefighters averaged $145,727, which was tops in the region \u2014 and nearly $20,000 more than the average for their colleagues across the state.<\/p>\n
Buffalo\u2019s payroll costs taxpayers $850 per resident, the Empire Center reports. Erie County\u2019s 5,326 employees cost taxpayers $394 per resident.<\/p>\n
The Empire Center\u2019s annual report looks at employees for all governments outside New York City and its five boroughs, using payroll data municipalities report to the state pension system. The dollar amounts do not include the cost of fringe benefits such as health insurance and pension contributions. <\/p>\n
School districts and public authorities, such as the New York Power Authority and the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority, were not included in the report.<\/p>\n
The report, released last week, covers the state\u2019s 2025-26 fiscal year, which ran from April 1, 2025 to March 31 of this year. It comprises data covering 179,222 workers.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Among the report\u2019s findings:<\/p>\n
The state\u2019s municipal payrolls added up to $12 billion.
\nFor cops and firefighters, the average salary statewide was $125,366.
\nFor all other government workers, the average was $57,983.
\n400 workers across the state made more than $300,000.
\n1,567 made more than $250,000, which is what the governor earns.
\nAbout one in five employees made more than $100,000.
\nPolice and fire comprised 13 percent of the public workforce in the state and about 25 percent of the payroll cost.<\/p>\n
All but 50 of the public employees who made over $300,000 worked on Long Island, most of them as cops in Nassau or Suffolk counties.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Long Islanders also accounted for three-quarters of those who earned more than the governor last year.<\/p>\n
In fact, Nassau County employees had the highest average pay \u2014 $114,732 \u2014 among the 57 counties outside New York City. Suffolk County ranks third on that list, behind Westchester County.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Erie County ranked ninth with an average pay of $70,591.<\/p>\n
As a region, Western New York ranked third in the number of government employees and average salary, behind Long Island and the Hudson Valley.<\/p>\n
The Empire Center\u2019s report does not include Erie County Medical Center and Roswell Park Cancer Center, whose executives and physicians are perennially among the state\u2019s highest paid employees.<\/p>\n
Thomas Quatroche, ECMC\u2019s president and CEO from 2016 until this past June, made $2,244,467 last fiscal year, according to the Empire Center\u2019s records. That made him the highest paid public employee in the state. <\/p>\n
Candace Johnson, the head of Roswell Park, was second that year, collecting $1,955,419.\u00a0Five more Roswell Park doctors, all making over $1 million a year, also fell on the list of 10 highest-paid public employees.<\/p>\n
The Empire Center found 5,720 people who appear to have been on the payroll of two or more governments last year. Most of those involve part-time jobs, according to the report\u2019s authors \u2014 like when a police officer in one municipality moonlights for a department elsewhere<\/a>.<\/p>\nThey offer as an example the case of Thomas Groneman, who earned $369,690 last year as a Suffolk County police officer and an extra $5,377 as a cop for the village of Head of the Harbor.<\/p>\n
Daniel Moyer, meanwhile, appeared on the payroll of 14 towns and one village in St. Lawrence County in the state\u2019s North Country, where he is a dogcatcher. His combined pay last year was $57,402.<\/p>\n
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\t\t\tposted 32 minutes ago – October 28, 2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Four of the 10 highest-paid municipal government employees in Western New York are Erie County Sheriff’s officers, according…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":315962,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[11400,136,69208,138,137,128843],"class_list":["post-315961","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-erie","tag-city-of-buffalo","tag-erie","tag-erie-county-government","tag-erie-headlines","tag-erie-news","tag-new-york-government"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315961","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=315961"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315961\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/315962"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=315961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=315961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=315961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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