By Erica C. Barnett
City negotiators have approved a new 2024-2027 contract with the Seattle Police Officers Guild that will raise the starting salary for new police recruits to $118,000—a 13 percent boost over the current starting salary of $104,000. After six months, new officers will earn a base salary of more than $126,000, according to documents reviewed by PubliCola.
The new contract will increase officers’ pay retroactively for 2024 and 2025, plus additional increases in 2026 and 2027. Officers who were around in 2024 and 2025 will get retroactive (and cumulative) pay increases of 6 percent for 2024 and 4.1 percent for 2025, on top of a 2.7 percent increase next year. (The number for 2027 will be somewhere between 3 and 4 percent.)
Cumulatively, all those raises represent a huge increase that far outpaces the raises other city unions have negotiated for city employees over the past few years. In 2021, the starting pay for a brand-new police officer was $83,000 a year. As of 2026, that number will have gone up by $35,000—a remarkable 42 percent pay increase in just five years.
Sergeants’ pay, meanwhile, will increase from a base wage of $140,000 ($146,000 after six months) to $159,000 ($167,000 after six months). After 18 months on the job, new cops and sergeants will make $132,000 and $177,000, respectively.
Mayor Bruce Harrell is expected to announce the new contract tomorrow—an October surprise as voters decide between the mayor and his opponent, labor organizer Katie Wilson. SPOG was reportedly in a rush to get a new contract passed this year, in advance of a potential Wilson victory; Wilson has expressed her support for strong police accountability measures, including improvements to the police misconduct investigation process and the implementation of a 2017 police accountability law that has never gone into full effect.
In his announcement, Harrell will likely emphasize changes that will allow the CARE Team, a group of social workers that responds alongside SPD to certain 911 calls, to expand from 24 to 48 members and respond directly to more types of calls, a change the mayor telegraphed in September when he announced a new public safety sales tax to pay for the expansion and predicted the team would soon be allowed to go out on more calls without officers in tow.
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The mayor will also probably focus on the need for officers to earn enough to live in Seattle (which many of them do not). That was the argument for increasing police salaries by 24 percent just last year, when the city adopted a three-year retroactive contract that raised Seattle police salaries to the highest in Washington state. The new contract bumps salaries for new officers above the Seattle median, which includes people in every industry and at every stage of their careers.
Those new salary figures don’t include overtime, paid at time and a half, which accounted for about 500,000 police hours in 2025. In a budget paper, the city council’s central staff noted that SPD is proposing to include less than 500,000 hours in the budget for the second year in a row; last year’s initial budget funded 489,000 hours, but the council had to amend that during the year to add 11,000 hours at a cost of $1.2 million.
The salaries also don’t include recruiting bonuses that range from $7,500 for new recruits to $50,000 for fully trained officers transferring from other departments (including Police Chief Shon Barnes, who accepted this “lateral” bonus on top of his $360,000 salary earlier this year.)
The retroactive contract the city approved last year did not include any meaningful new accountability measures, such as progress toward implementing a 2017 accountability ordinance that called for major changes in the way officers are investigated and disciplined for misconduct. At the time, supporters of the retroactive contract generally agreed that it was important to make sure officers got paid as soon as possible for the years they worked under an expired contract, and that new accountability measures would be part of the 2024-2027 agreement.
We’ll know more about any new accountability measures once the full contract is released. However, sources familiar with the contract said the improvements are fairly minimal. For instance, the new agreement reportedly reduces the burden of proof in arbitration proceedings from “clear and convincing” (editor’s note: corrected from “beyond a reasonable doubt”) to “preponderance of the evidence,” making it easier for the city’s Office of Police Accountability to demonstrate misconduct when an officer appeals their case to an outside arbitrator.
Because the new spending on officer salaries is retroactive to 2024, meaning that police officers will get back pay for 2024 and 2025 to bring their pay for those years up to the amounts in the new contract. Although the city sets aside reserves to pay for negotiated increases to officer pay, these increased costs become an ongoing part of the city’s budget, adding to projected deficits in the hundreds of millions of dollars starting in 2027.
The contract agreement doesn’t represent a final contract, which still has to be lawyered and approved by the city council. A majority of the city council sits on the Labor Relations Policy Committee that signed off on the agreement with SPOG, so approval is a foregone conclusion. Historically, dissent on police contracts is rare, since rejecting a contract would force the city back into negotiations—a process that, with the exception of this year’s speedy approval, typically takes years.
