It pays to work in city government.
Municipal workers made nearly twice as much as their counterparts in the private sector in former Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s last years in office — earning a median salary of $65,300 in fiscal year 2012, a new analysis found.
By comparison, median income for a private sector worker was roughly $34,100 that year, according to the city’s Independent Budget Office.
The analysis was based on a little-noticed city report that had been quietly released on Bloomberg’s last day at City Hall.
The IBO found that while median city worker salaries stayed relatively flat over the past 10 years when adjusted for inflation, they climbed by about $6,000 between fiscal years 2005 and 2012.
“That small gain might look pretty good to a large share of the rest of the city,” IBO Chief of Staff Doug Turetsky wrote in a blog post.
That’s because private- sector salaries dropped by $3,000 on average over the same time period.
Despite the relatively steady state of municipal salaries, city payroll costs ballooned from $23.5 billion in fiscal 2003 to $37.2 billion in fiscal 2012, largely due to soaring pension and health-care costs.
Without adjusting for inflation, the cost of pension and fringe benefits increased by more than 140 percent over those 10 years, the city analysis found.
“The report . . . could fuel arguments on both sides of the negotiations to settle the city’s expired labor contracts,” Turetsky said.
Union leaders could point to the relatively stagnant salaries, while City Hall could highlight the increased payroll costs.
All 152 municipal city contracts expired under Bloomberg, and Mayor de Blasio said he wants to settle as many as possible this year.
The report offers a number of tidbits about the 39 agencies that employ 304,066 full-time workers and 23,727 part-timers.
It found that workers in the Police, Fire and Correction departments earned the highest median salary in fiscal 2012 (nearly $76,500).
At the opposite end of the scale, staffers at the Housing Authority had a median income of just over $40,600.
The analysis also found that the number of city workers over age 55 jumped from 15 percent in fiscal 2003 to 23 percent in fiscal 2012.
Additionally, about 19 percent of municipal employees were eligible to retire in fiscal 2012 with full pensions.
“These trends suggest that the city has an aging workforce,” the report found.