"The courts have long held that taxpayers are entitled to know how much their elected officials and public employees are compensated. With today's release of pay and benefit data for all court employees -- from the Supreme Court’s Chief Justice to local judges and their support staff -- California's judiciary is leading by example and helping us provide a one-stop source of transparency," said Chiang. "It is my hope that this expanded access to data about how public dollars are being spent will encourage taxpayers to be more civically-engaged."
Previous years of pay data allowed viewers to find judges and employees from the state's 58 superior courts in their respective county data, while appellate courts, the Supreme Court and other state judicial officers were placed in the state employee pay data.
Starting with the 2013 data, the Superior Courts have been separated into a “Superior Courts” category. Today’s posting also adds a separate “Judicial” category that also includes employees of the superior courts, as well as those of the courts of appeal, Supreme Court, Habeas Corpus Resource Center, Judicial Center Library, Judicial Council, and the Commission on Judicial Performance. The “Judicial” category includes data on a total of 22,310 judicial and court employees who earned almost $1.57 billion in wages in 2013.
The Administrative Office of the Courts identified 1,648 superior court judge positions whose wages totaled $267.1 million in 2013. The median wage was about $176,000. Though these positions account for roughly 8 percent of the court employee positions, the judges receive about 21 percent of total salaries paid.
The counties report a wide variation in annual salaries. For example, the 471 superior court judges in Los Angeles County had a median wage of $221,000 in 2013, while the 119 judges in neighboring Orange County had a median wage of $155,000.
In the Bay Area, 28 Contra Costa County judges had the highest median wage at $177,000, and San Francisco superior court judges had the lowest median wage at $164,000. Sacramento County and San Diego County judges had median wages of $176,000 and $174,000, respectively.
County-by-county differences may be the result of local decisions. While the state pays a base wage to all superior court judges, counties can elect to supplement their pay and benefits.
The Controller’s publicpay.ca.gov site also contains salary and compensation information for other public entities in California, including 58 counties, more than 450 cities, more than 2,900 special districts, more than 100 higher education providers, and most state employees. The site offer maps, search functions, and custom report-building tools. It also allows users to download raw data for their own research.
Since the public pay site's launch in 2010, it has registered more than 7.7 million page views online. The site now contains information on more than 1.2 million positions with $295.6 billion in wages and $77.4 billion in total benefits paid from 2009 through 2013.