First-Line Supervisors of Police and Detectives
What the pay figures show
- The pay leader for this job is California, at $163,960. Tax does not shift it. Prices are the twist. Adjust for what a basket costs and Nevada comes out ahead, worth $104,719. Worth knowing before anyone packs.
- Nominal and post-tax rankings agree for first-line supervisors of police and detectives: California leads at $163,960 on both. Applying regional price parities separates them, promoting Nevada to $104,719 in real terms. Price level, not tax, is the operative variable for this occupation — and it is the one absent from essentially every published wage comparison.
Compare this career across states
Choose your filing status and local taxes, compare pay, and keep a shortlist.Compare wage and personal-pay outcomes by state, with selected resident local taxes and saved career choices.
Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$106,040
People doing it
154,610
Highest paid
$163,960
CA
Best off, really
$104,719
NV, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$63,350
Highest tenth
$165,110
Lowest, really
$54,959
MS
States with data
51
National average
$112,190
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
96.98%
NV, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Geography does a lot of the work in this job. Pay roughly doubles between the lowest state and the highest. Tax and prices narrow that gap. They come nowhere near closing it — the real range is still $54,959 up to $104,719.
- 154,610 people do this job across the country, and the middle one earns $106,040. Common work, though not one of the giants.
- Coverage is complete — all 51 jurisdictions publish this, on a middle wage of $106,040. Nothing is missing.
- The nominal spread for first-line supervisors of police and detectives approaches a factor of two across states. Deflating for tax and price level compresses it substantially but leaves a real range of $54,959 to $104,719, indicating that most of the dispersion is real purchasing power rather than compensation for local costs.
- National employment in first-line supervisors of police and detectives is 154,610 — a substantial occupation, though an order of magnitude below the largest. Regional differentials here move real aggregate sums without dominating any single state's wage bill.
- Coverage for first-line supervisors of police and detectives is complete at 51 jurisdictions. No suppression applies, so the highest and lowest figures above are genuinely the national extremes.
Pay band: First-Line Supervisors of Police and Detectives
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $63,350 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $106,040 |
| Top tenth earn over | $165,110 |
| This salary | $106,040 |
Positions between the published tenth, quarter, half, three-quarter and ninetieth points are estimated by straight line.
Where these numbers come from
| BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS), May 2025 estimates, time-series bulk download (oe.data.0.Current) | as of 2025-05-01 |
|---|
Steps in First-Line Supervisors of Police and Detectives
The national median for this job
$106,040around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $63,350 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $106,040 |
| Top tenth | $165,110 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
First-Line Supervisors of Police and Detectives, state by state
The national median for this job
51states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Mississippi · $59,860 |
|---|---|
| Highest | California · $163,960 |
| Spread | $104,100 |
One dot per state that publishes this job. A missing state means suppressed data, not zero pay.
Best paid, and best off
The national median for this job
| Texas pays | $111,000 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $114,227 |
Median pay against the same pay once BEA price parities are applied.
Every state, three ways
Sorted by what the money is actually worth. "Kept" is take-home for a single filer after federal, FICA and state income tax. "Really worth" divides that by the state's own price level, so a dollar in each row buys the same thing. Tap a state to put your own salary into it. States BLS does not publish for this job are absent — that means no published figure, not no work.
| State | Median pay | Kept after tax | Really worth |
|---|---|---|---|
| NV | $132,100 | $101,556 | $104,719 |
| AK | $137,320 | $105,124 | $103,352 |
| CA | $163,960 | $112,176 | $99,641 |
| IL | $135,080 | $97,052 | $98,176 |
| WA | $136,280 | $104,413 | $96,179 |
| DE | $131,080 | $93,439 | $94,142 |
| NJ | $142,990 | $102,081 | $93,753 |
| CO | $126,810 | $93,069 | $91,801 |
| HI | $140,590 | $98,084 | $90,309 |
| TX | $111,000 | $86,919 | $89,445 |
| NE | $106,100 | $79,347 | $87,797 |
| ND | $98,300 | $77,326 | $87,303 |
| MN | $118,750 | $85,819 | $87,199 |
| UT | $110,500 | $81,650 | $85,945 |
| DC | $134,760 | $94,888 | $85,636 |
| MD | $120,700 | $88,257 | $84,892 |
| IA | $98,840 | $75,220 | $84,738 |
| NY | $124,080 | $89,607 | $83,258 |
| OH | $98,380 | $76,051 | $82,834 |
| OR | $122,130 | $84,606 | $80,791 |
| WY | $91,400 | $73,130 | $80,497 |
| SD | $87,810 | $70,604 | $80,146 |
| PA | $102,400 | $77,725 | $79,718 |
| AZ | $104,850 | $80,373 | $79,495 |
| MI | $98,140 | $73,951 | $78,518 |
| WI | $97,120 | $72,843 | $78,244 |
| MO | $94,440 | $71,767 | $78,210 |
| ID | $94,920 | $71,429 | $78,128 |
| NM | $92,200 | $70,506 | $78,005 |
| CT | $109,360 | $80,453 | $77,591 |
| FL | $100,880 | $79,799 | $77,136 |
| VT | $99,280 | $74,231 | $76,816 |
| MT | $89,380 | $68,020 | $75,373 |
| NH | $100,060 | $79,222 | $75,203 |
| VA | $101,230 | $74,985 | $74,428 |
| NC | $91,100 | $69,793 | $74,138 |
| RI | $97,690 | $74,267 | $73,233 |
| OK | $82,830 | $63,874 | $72,349 |
| MA | $104,320 | $77,323 | $71,438 |
| ME | $92,350 | $68,837 | $70,896 |
| KS | $82,950 | $62,845 | $69,855 |
| KY | $80,390 | $62,688 | $69,293 |
| IN | $81,540 | $63,817 | $69,228 |
| TN | $74,770 | $61,431 | $66,401 |
| AL | $75,970 | $59,036 | $65,617 |
| WV | $74,280 | $58,573 | $65,246 |
| LA | $70,470 | $56,678 | $64,155 |
| GA | $80,120 | $61,795 | $63,905 |
| SC | $73,700 | $58,107 | $62,362 |
| AR | $62,290 | $50,384 | $58,242 |
| MS | $59,860 | $47,975 | $54,959 |
Sources and assumptions
- These are middle-of-the-range figures for this job, not what a new starter is offered. Half the people doing this job earn under $106,040 nationally, half over. Your own experience and employer will move you well away from that midpoint in either direction.
- The take-home numbers here use the simplest possible household: one filer for this job, no children, no pension contributions, standard deduction. Real life usually reduces the tax bill below this. City and school-district income taxes are left out, and in Ohio or Pennsylvania that is a real omission. The best after-tax state here is California, at $112,176.
- Levelling out prices for this job is done with one number per state, which is a simplification. Living costs inside a state vary a lot between its cities and its countryside. The comparison shows which way the ranking moves, not an exact figure for any address — Mississippi sits at the bottom on $54,959.
- All wage figures for first-line supervisors of police and detectives are medians rather than entry or offer rates; the national median is $106,040. Within-state dispersion typically exceeds between-state dispersion in this data, so an individual's expected wage is determined more by experience, sector and employer than by the state comparisons presented here.
- Retained-pay figures for first-line supervisors of police and detectives model a single filer taking the standard deduction with no dependants and no pre-tax deferrals — deliberately the simplest household, so the comparison across states isolates geography rather than personal circumstances. Local income taxes are outside the model; Ohio, Pennsylvania and Maryland residents should expect a meaningfully lower figure than $112,176, which leads in California.
- The price deflation applied to first-line supervisors of police and detectives uses state-level parities. Within-state dispersion in price level, concentrated in housing, is large enough that a state figure describes no particular locality well; the bottom of this occupation's real range is Mississippi at $54,959. The comparison establishes the direction and rough magnitude of the reordering rather than an address-level result — Mississippi anchors the bottom at $54,959 — and the two source series are dated independently.