North Carolina's Prisons Are Short 2,808 Officers. The Empty Seats Are Worth $135 Million a Year.

North Carolina's legislature built a watchdog office last year specifically to hunt for waste.▸ Its first audit found the opposite of waste in the usual sense — not money spent badly, but money never spent at all, sitting budgeted against jobs nobody is doing. The DAVE Act audit, released in January 2026 by the North Carolina Office of the State Auditor, counted 8,845 state positions that had gone unfilled for six months or longer as of last August — and traced $1.04 billion in salary that piled up, unpaid, while those seats stayed empty.

North Carolina's 46 state agencies carry 79,813 budgeted positions.▸ As of last summer, 14,366 of them — 18% — sat vacant. Most of those are ordinary churn: someone quit, a replacement is being hired. But 8,845 of the vacant positions, 11% of the entire state workforce, had been empty for six months or more, which is the threshold the audit used to call a vacancy "long-term."

Long-term vacancies generated $1.04 billion in lapsed salary — the budgeted dollars that would have paid those positions since they opened up, never spent because no one filled the seat.▸ Auditors also ran the number forward: if this same set of 8,845 jobs stayed empty for a full fiscal year, it would lapse $482 million in a single year, equal to 1.6% of the state's entire $30.8 billion budget. Some of that money has strings attached — a third of it is federal or grant funding that can't simply be redirected — but the auditors found that seven agencies admitted to keeping positions open on purpose, mostly to bank the lapsed salary for other costs. The State Highway Patrol led that list: it purposefully held open 113 of its 161 long-term vacancies — 70% — with the agency citing nationally low starting pay and using the lapsed money in part "to make fuel purchases and respond to other vehicle needs."

No agency's vacancies cost more, or matter more for public safety, than the Department of Adult Correction's. DAC employs 7,947 correctional officers against a workforce plan that calls for far more — 2,808 of those positions are vacant, a 35.3% vacancy rate, and 2,039 of the vacancies (26% of all CO positions) have gone unfilled for six months or longer.▸ DAC's long-term vacancies alone would lapse $135.4 million in salary over a year, essentially tied with the Department of Health and Human Services ($135.0 million) for the largest dollar total of any agency in the state.

The mid-level rank is worst off: Correctional Officer II carries a 42% vacancy rate, and three-quarters of those vacant slots have sat empty for more than six months.▸ The audit's own explanation is direct: pay.

The audit's report on DAC cites Bureau of Labor Statistics wage data directly to make the comparison: North Carolina's average correctional officer salary is $50,450, against a national average of $62,760 — a $12,310 gap.▸ Every one of North Carolina's neighbors pays more except Georgia.

Starting pay is worse than the average implies: according to DAC's own account to the auditors, a new North Carolina correctional officer starts at $37,621 — the third-lowest starting salary in the country, ahead of only Louisiana ($37,440) and New Mexico ($35,440).▸ Southeastern neighbor states average $44,920 to start, $7,299 more. The auditors point out that North Carolina doesn't need a new appropriation to close part of that gap — it could eliminate a portion of the vacant positions and redirect the lapsed salary already sitting against them into raises for the officers it does have. It hasn't.

Figures reflect the North Carolina Office of the State Auditor's snapshot of state employment as of July 31 and August 6, 2025, the most recent data in its January 2026 audit; the audit itself notes that agencies filled roughly 13% of the long-term vacancies it counted in the months afterward, so current totals will be somewhat lower. The correctional officer wage comparison is Bureau of Labor Statistics data as reproduced in the audit; BLS's own website returned repeated access errors to direct requests while researching this piece.