NYPD Overtime Beat Its Budget by $1.4B in Three Years

New York City adopts an overtime budget for its police department every year, and every year NYPD spends far more than that budget allows.▸ A June 2026 report from the NYC Comptroller's Office⧉ puts a number on the gap: NYPD's uniformed overtime spending reached $960 million in FY2025, a record in nominal dollars and more than double the $478 million the City had adopted for it. That wasn't a one-year event. In each of the last three completed fiscal years, NYPD's actual overtime spending has run more than double its adopted budget -- a combined $1.449 billion beyond what the City budgeted for uniformed overtime across FY2023, FY2024, and FY2025 alone.

The pattern is consistent enough to plot: $821 million actual against $372 million adopted in FY2023⧉, $955 million against $437 million in FY2024, and $960 million against $478 million in FY2025 -- overspends of 121%, 119%, and 101% respectively.▸ The Comptroller's Office projects NYPD uniformed overtime will moderate slightly to approximately $890 million in FY2026, about 7% below FY2025's record. But that projection is still the third-highest year on record, and still $287 million above NYPD's own FY2013-FY2023 average of $603 million. Averaged across the full FY2013-FY2025 span, NYPD has overspent its adopted overtime budget by 53% every year⧉ -- overtime isn't a marginal miss against the plan; it is the plan's most reliable failure.

The Comptroller's Office broke down NYPD's most recent quarterly overtime filing -- October through December 2025 -- by category, and found $45,932,306 in Event/Details overtime spending across 578,231 hours⧉ in that quarter alone.▸ Planned Events -- parades, street fairs, entertainment, and other events NYPD schedules in advance -- accounted for $26.4 million of that, 58% of the quarter's Event/Details spending and 59% of its hours. These are not emergencies; NYPD's own documentation describes Planned Events as including "parades, street fairs, quality-of-life initiatives, and sport/entertainment events."

The same report finds that roughly 70.8% of FY2025's overtime spending fell outside ordinary precinct-level patrol overtime altogether, and that subway safety overtime -- another recurring, plannable deployment -- ran $151 million in FY2023, $144 million in FY2024, and $161 million in FY2025.▸ The through-line across every category the Comptroller examined is the same: NYPD's overtime bill is being driven less by the unexpected than by how the department chooses to staff what it already knows is coming.

NYPD is not the City's only overtime problem, but it dwarfs the others.▸ Citywide overtime spending rose from $1.66 billion in FY2015 to $2.71 billion in FY2025⧉, with NYPD accounting for approximately 40% of that annual total. In FY2025, NYPD's $960 million in uniformed overtime was nearly matched by the combined overtime spending of the City's other three major uniformed agencies⧉ -- FDNY at $478 million, the Department of Correction at $307 million, and Sanitation at $179 million, totaling $964 million, just $4 million more than NYPD spent by itself. The FY2026 projections show the same shape: NYPD's projected $890 million is nearly matched by FDNY, DOC, and DSNY's combined projected $1.061 billion. NYPD employs more than half the City's uniformed staff across the four agencies, but the scale of its overtime bill makes it, by a wide margin, the City's single largest opportunity to bring uniformed overtime spending down.

NYPD has not ignored the problem.▸ Commissioner Jessica Tisch, appointed in November 2024 amid heightened scrutiny of overtime controls, described transferring "nearly 1,000 officers" from desk assignments back into transit, housing, and patrol commands⧉, and NYPD put a uniform overtime plan in place effective January 1, 2025, adding thresholds, documentation requirements, and overtime compliance officers in every command. FY2026's modest year-over-year decline suggests the plan is doing something.

But the plan has a specific, documented gap: OIG-NYPD's own April 1, 2025 Eleventh Annual Report found⧉ that "the policies do not address mandatory time off, rest periods after long shifts or mandatory overtime, or provide guidance to commanding officers on methods of shift scheduling for purpose of mitigating officer fatigue."▸ NYPD's own oversight watchdog flagged the same missing fatigue safeguards two years earlier, in its May 2023 report on overtime and negative policing outcomes. As of this report, those recommendations had still not been adopted.

Six days after the Comptroller's report, New York State's Financial Control Board published its own staff analysis⧉ of the City's FY2027 Executive Budget -- a separate state oversight body, using its own budget staff, reviewing the same numbers independently.▸ Its conclusion lines up with the Comptroller's: "the largest expenditure risk is uniformed services overtime, which the FCB estimates as underbudgeted by more than $710 million annually beginning in FY 2027." The FCB's own year-by-year table puts that risk at $714 million in FY2027, $724 million in FY2028, $715 million in FY2029, and $734 million in FY2030 -- an average of $721.75 million a year for four straight years. The Mayor's FY2027 Executive Budget does add funding aimed at chronic overtime underbudgeting, and both the Comptroller and the Financial Control Board credit it as a shift toward more realistic numbers. Neither believes it closes the gap.