Correctional officer salaries by state and employer

What correctional officers earn in state prisons and county jails: what full-year officers actually earned, overtime included, next to the official pay range, with sergeants ($152,162 on average in California), lieutenants and captains counted on their own. So far the site covers California's state prisons and county jails, New York City's Department of Correction and the Nassau, Suffolk and Broome county jails, the State of Utah's prisons and Utah's county jails, Louisville Metro's jail and the Georgia Department of Corrections and the Fulton County jail; more states follow as we collect their data.

2025 dataCalifornia$125,799average total pay of full-year correctional officers128,969 correctional officers46 employer pagesCompare every California prison and jail employer2024 and 2025 dataNew York$171,142average total pay of full-year correctional officers29,866 correctional officers4 employer pagesCompare every New York prison and jail employer2025 dataGeorgia$62,570average total pay of full-year correctional officers34,260 correctional officers2 employer pagesCompare every Georgia prison and jail employerfiscal year 2025 dataUtah$83,699average total pay of full-year correctional officers41,835 correctional officers18 employer pagesCompare every Utah prison and jail employer2025 dataKentucky$82,100average total pay of full-year correctional officers5279 correctional officers1 employer pagesCompare every Kentucky prison and jail employer

Work in progress

Correctional officer pay in more states, as we collect the data

This page will compare correctional officer pay across states. For now it covers California's state prisons and county jails, New York City's Department of Correction and the Nassau, Suffolk and Broome county jails, the State of Utah's prisons and Utah's county jails, Louisville Metro's jail and the Georgia Department of Corrections and the Fulton County jail. Each state publishes public pay differently, so we add states one at a time, after checking their files.

Until then, each state's page has everything we've published so far.

Sources for the state figures

Total pay is gross wages before tax, overtime included, of correctional officers who worked roughly the full year. Each state's page explains its full-year rule.

  1. State Controller's Office, Government Compensation in California, 2025: wages of every correctional officer position.
  2. City of New York, Citywide Payroll Data (Fiscal Year); Suffolk County, County Salaries by Department 2024 and 2023; Broome County, Annual Employee Earnings (Open NY); Nassau County Comptroller, Nassau Open Payroll, the newest year each employer has published (2024 and 2025): wages of every correctional officer position.
  3. Georgia Department of Audits and Accounts, Open Georgia, salaries and travel, fiscal years 2024 and 2025; Fulton County Government (GA), Payroll Public Dataset, Share Fulton (CC BY 4.0), 2025 (the fiscal year from July 2024 for the Department of Corrections, the calendar year for Fulton County): wages of every correctional officer position.
  4. Transparent Utah, Office of the Utah State Auditor, fiscal year 2025: wages of every correctional officer position.
  5. Louisville Metro Government, Louisville Metro KY Employee Salary Data (Louisville Open Data), 2025: wages of every correctional officer position.

How we read the data