Empire Center says Suffolk police overtime inflated pensions, driving taxpayer costs

Two out of five Suffolk County police retirees used overtime to push up their pensions, a practice the Empire Center says translated into about $39,000 more a year for the officers in its sample and a lasting bill for county taxpayers.

The Albany-based think tank said in a May 5 report that Suffolk County Police Department retirees who left in 2024 boosted overtime by 73% over their last three years on the job, the window used to calculate pension benefits. Those officers averaged about 497 overtime hours a year, or 9.6 hours a week, and their final three-year pay rose by an average of 34% because of that extra work. Since pensions are paid for life and receive cost-of-living increases, the report argues the overtime does not vanish when the shift ends.

The report places Suffolk inside a broader New York pension system that still allows many pre-reform workers to count overtime in final-average salary calculations. The state’s 2009 pension overhaul, known as Tier V, was projected to save taxpayers $48.5 billion over 30 years by curbing salary spiking, and Tier VI took effect for employees who joined a public retirement system on or after April 1, 2012. Workers hired before those changes can still legally build larger pensions through heavy overtime near retirement.

That leaves Suffolk County and other local governments with pension costs that can shadow budgets for years. The Empire Center said the Suffolk sample’s overtime added about $39,000 a year to annual pensions, a figure that can ripple through county finances long after the officers retire. In 2019, three-quarters of the 242 Nassau and Suffolk County police retirees were eligible for annual pensions above $100,000, showing how common six-figure retirement checks have become on Long Island.

The issue is not limited to pensions alone. Suffolk County employees averaged $100,506 in pay in the Empire Center’s 2024 payroll report, and Suffolk had 291 of the 522 local-government employees statewide who were paid more than $300,000 in 2023-24. Suffolk County police official Michael Marchan was listed at $425,127, the highest salary among New York local-government employees that year.

The bigger fight now sits in Albany, where Governor Kathy Hochul and the Legislature are debating whether to roll back the pension reforms adopted 17 years ago. The Empire Center warned that any retreat could expand spiking to a new generation of public workers and deepen long-term taxpayer costs in Suffolk and across New York.