What do City workers earn?

The ethnicity gap

• 4.7% of full-time employees have no ethnicity recorded or declined to answer (2,163 people, 2025).
• 19.5% of everyone paid in 2025 has no ethnicity recorded or declined (13,297 people).
• 30.4% of the 2025 payroll rows (one per person per job) carry no ethnicity.

Every figure here is subject to that gap: a share of the total includes the people with no ethnicity recorded, so the shares of the other groups are shares of everyone, not of those who answered.

How the labels are handled

The categories are the City's, as recorded in its payroll data; LA Receipts does not assign or correct them. The grouped view combines only labels that are plainly the same:

• Black or African American combines Black or African American and Black.
• Two or more races combines Two or more races and Multiple.
• White combines White and Caucasian.
• Asian combines Asian and Asian American.
• American Indian or Alaska Native combines American Indian or Alaska Native and American Indian/Alaskan Native.
• Not reported or declined combines Unknown, NA, Not applicable, Declined to answer and (blank).
• Not reported (gender) combines Unknown and (blank).

Every other label is shown as published, including labels whose meaning is unclear (American, Native, Other) and Filipino, which the City lists separately from Asian.

A person can have more than one payroll row in a year. Each person is counted once, under a label from any of their rows that is not Unknown, NA, Not applicable, Declined to answer or blank. A person whose rows carry two different labels is counted under “More than one label recorded”.

In 2025, American, Black, Filipino, Multiple, NA and Native appear only in Water and Power's records, which use a different set of labels from other departments.

Small numbers

Cells with fewer than 10 people show as “fewer than 10”. So that a hidden figure cannot be worked out by subtraction (from a department's total, the citywide total, or the other view), another figure is also hidden, marked “hidden”: usually the next-smallest, or, in a department's gender row, the largest, which a reader can still estimate to within a few people. This is repeated until every hidden figure could still be any of at least 3 values. Departments with fewer than 20 full-time employees are not broken down, and everyone paid is shown citywide only, because the gap between a department's two counts would reveal small groups of part-time and seasonal workers.

No one's ethnicity or gender is shown, stored or downloadable. These are counts only.