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We cover Pensacola the way a serious paper used to cover this city: city hall, the county commission, the school board, the planning agencies, the budgets, the votes, the deals. We pay attention because attention is what's been missing.
Pensacola has not had a daily metro paper at full strength in a long time. What's been lost in that gap isn't just stories. It's the basic civic record of who voted for what, who got the contract, what the agenda actually said before the vote. We're trying to put some of that record back.
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We cover the decisions that shape daily life in Pensacola and Escambia County. That means city hall, county commission, the school board, zoning hearings, development proposals, budget fights, and the institutions that affect residents whether they're paying attention or not.
We also cover culture, military affairs at NAS Pensacola, the Gulf Coast economy, sports, and the events that make this city worth living in. We write editorials when the moment calls for it and label them clearly as opinion.
Local journalism is infrastructure. When it disappears — and it has been disappearing across the country for two decades — residents lose the practical ability to hold institutions accountable. Budgets get passed without scrutiny. Contracts get awarded without review. Decisions get made without public input because no one is there to report them.
We believe Pensacola is better when it knows what's happening. We're here to make sure it does.
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Last updated: April 2026
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Last updated: April 2026
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The Flightline is based in Pensacola, Florida. We do not have a public walk-in office at this time. All correspondence is handled by email.
Florida law says every government salary is public record. This database covers all 41 elected and appointed officials in Escambia County and the City of Pensacola — confirmed salaries, sources, and analysis.
The top elected official in Escambia County earns 6.7× what the average resident makes.
Sources: FL Office of Economic & Demographic Research, Salaries of Elected County Constitutional Officers and School District Officials for Fiscal Year 2025-26 (EDR finsal25.pdf, Oct. 2025) · FL General Appropriations Act Ch. 2025-198, s.8 (State Attorneys, Public Defenders, Judges) · U.S. BLS OEWS Pensacola-Ferry Pass-Brent MSA, May 2024 · U.S. Census Bureau ACS 2024 · ECPS/EEA salary agreement, Board vote March 18, 2025 (WEAR-TV, WKRG) · City of Pensacola Ordinance (mayor salary), passed July 21, 2022 (final reading Aug. 18, 2022) · City Charter amendment (council salary formula), effective after 2024 election (WUWF, Nov. 2025)
| Position | Salary | Yr |
|---|---|---|
| City of Pensacola | ||
| Mayor | $134,000 | FY2025-26 |
| City Council member (×9) | $38,204 | FY2025-26 |
| Escambia County — FL EDR FY2025-26 · Ch. 145 F.S. | ||
| Sheriff's Office | $251,373 | FY2025-26 |
| Tax Collector | $211,197 | FY2025-26 |
| School Superintendent | $211,197 | FY2025-26 |
| Clerk of Circuit Court | $182,903 | FY2025-26 |
| Property Appraiser | $182,903 | FY2025-26 |
| Supervisor of Elections | $182,903 | FY2025-26 |
| County Commissioner (×5) | $104,942 | FY2025-26 |
| Boards & Authorities | ||
| School Board member (×5) | $50,367 | FY2025-26 |
| ECUA Board member (×5) | $50,367 | FY2025-26 |
| State of Florida · FL Appropriations Act, eff. July 1, 2025 | ||
| State Attorney (1st Circuit) | $223,318 | FY2025-26 |
| Public Defender (1st Circuit) | $223,318 | FY2025-26 |
| Circuit Court Judge | $200,836 | FY2025-26 |
| County Court Judge | $189,755 | FY2025-26 |
| State Senator (District 1) | $29,697 | FY2025-26 |
| State Representative (×2) | $29,697 | FY2025-26 |
| ECSD — teacher salaries · EEA/ECPS agreement | ||
| Min. starting teacher | $48,300 | FY2024-25 |
| School Board member (×5) | $50,367 | FY2025-26 |
| BLS OEWS · Pensacola MSA · May 2024 · mean annual | ||
| Registered nurse | $88,730 | May 2024 |
| Police & sheriff officer (mean) | $66,470 | May 2024 |
| Elementary teacher (mean) | $58,460 | May 2024 |
| Firefighter (mean) | $56,180 | May 2024 |
| All workers — mean hourly | $27.13/hr | May 2024 |
The year was 1976. Reubin O'Donovan Askew — a Pensacola kid who shined shoes, bagged groceries, and sold his mother's homemade pies to help her make ends meet, who went on to law school and then to the Florida governor's mansion — put a question on the state ballot. He called it the Sunshine Amendment. It passed with 78 percent of the vote.
It required public officials to disclose their personal finances. It banned gifts to legislators. It created the Florida Commission on Ethics. Combined with the Government in the Sunshine Law passed nine years earlier in 1967 — which opened government meetings to the public — Askew helped build the transparency architecture that Florida still operates under today.
Askew moved to Pensacola with his mother in 1937, graduated from Pensacola High School in 1946, and got his start in public life as Assistant County Solicitor for Escambia County in 1956. The city that raised him became the beneficiary of the principles he carried into office. He died in 2014, leaving behind a framework that says, plainly: the public has the right to know what government costs and who is being paid what.
The Flightline is going to use that framework. This is part of our Let the Sunshine In feature — using Florida's public records laws to report on government pay, spending, contracts, and decisions that affect every person living in this metro area.
Florida has one of the country's strongest government transparency laws. Salaries of government employees are public record at every level — county, municipal, state, school board, utility authority. That's the law. What the law doesn't do is make those numbers easy to find, easy to understand, or easy to compare.
Start with what the average Pensacolian earns. The median household income in Pensacola was $74,212 in 2024, per the Census Bureau's American Community Survey. Across Escambia County as a whole — including communities north of downtown — the median was $67,500. The metro area's average hourly wage was $27.13 in May 2024, compared to a national average of $32.66 per the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That gap — roughly $11,000 per year — is the backdrop for every public salary conversation in this county.
Now look at what the county's elected and appointed leadership earns. The county administrator is appointed, not elected, and their salary is set by contract rather than state formula — the position is not included in the EDR schedule. The sheriff earns $251,373 in FY2025-26 under the Florida EDR formula. The property appraiser earns $182,903. The supervisor of elections, $182,903. County commissioners earn $104,942 each. Those salaries don't come from local negotiation — they come from Tallahassee, set by a population-based formula in Florida Statutes Chapter 145 that the Legislature has used since the 1970s.
The mayor's office is a separate story. City Council voted in July 2022 to raise the mayor's salary from $100,000 to $134,000 — a position that had been frozen since 2010 through twelve years of inflation, population growth, and rising expectations. The first reading passed 5-2 on July 21, 2022, with Council members Ann Hill and Teniade Broughton voting against. The increase took effect after the November 2022 election. Mayor D.C. Reeves currently earns that figure. City Council members earned $13,998 for years, until a 2022 charter amendment tied their pay to the same formula used for school board members. For FY2025-26, the council salary is $38,204 — computed from the charter formula and the FL EDR factors.
The mayor's office itself put the front-line problem plainly. A salary study commissioned before the 2024 pay reform found the city ranked in the 21st percentile among municipalities in the Southeast.
The reform cost more than $5 million, phased in over three years, with 75 percent of the investment going to employees earning less than $60,000 per year.
That's the piece the headline numbers miss. The sheriff earns $251,373 — that's a management salary for running a law enforcement agency with hundreds of deputies. County commissioners earn $104,942 for a part-time elected position. Those figures are set by state formula and not negotiable at the local level. But the front-line workers — corrections officers, enforcement officers, maintenance crews, librarians — are on a completely different pay schedule. The county's own official wage database at myescambia.com shows the range; the BLS Pensacola MSA data puts the broader context around it. Police and sheriff patrol officers in the metro averaged $66,470 annually in May 2024. Firefighters averaged $56,180. Elementary teachers averaged $58,460 — higher than the minimum starting salary of $48,300, reflecting years of experience, but still below what comparable metro areas pay.
The BLS OEWS data for the Pensacola-Ferry Pass-Brent MSA shows the local economy paying less than the national average across almost every occupation. The mean hourly wage for all workers here was $27.13 in May 2024, compared to $32.66 nationally — a gap of roughly $11,400 per year. That puts pressure on every government employer in the county competing against private-sector wages for the same talent pool.
Teachers in Escambia start at $48,300 per the 2024-25 agreement ratified by the school board in March 2025. The mean annual salary for elementary school teachers in the metro was $58,460 according to BLS May 2024 — meaning most experienced teachers earn above the minimum, but the floor is low enough that entry-level educators remain below the county median household income. For a workforce of more than 7,000 district employees, that starting point matters for recruiting.
Florida's Sunshine Law guarantees the right to ask. Escambia County has a searchable salary database at myescambia.com. The state maintains its own at salaries.myflorida.com. But the state database doesn't include municipal or county employees — it covers state agency employees only. Local governments post their own data in their own formats, with their own levels of accessibility. Some post it prominently. Others require a formal public records request.
Board members present a particular opacity problem. The ECUA board, the school board, the airport authority, the Community Redevelopment Agency — dozens of appointed and elected officials touching public money sit on bodies whose compensation is rarely examined collectively. Most board pay is modest. Some is nominal. But the point isn't the amount: it's the principle. Anyone drawing public funds for public duties should be findable in one search, not scattered across a dozen agency websites in different fiscal year formats.
Florida's transparency infrastructure is better than most states. What it doesn't provide is context, comparison, or a single front door. The databases linked above are that front door. The data has always been public. It just hasn't been assembled this way before.
Askew didn't get the Sunshine Amendment passed because Florida government was uniquely corrupt. He got it passed because he believed taxpayers were entitled to know what their officials were paid, what they owned, and who paid them — and that the absence of that information was its own kind of corruption. He tried three times to get the Legislature to pass financial disclosure on its own. The legislature said no three times. So he took it to the voters. Seventy-eight percent of them said yes.
The numbers on this page are the kind he wanted you to be able to find.
Our index above covers named elected officials. For the full workforce — all county employees, city employees, teachers — use these official sources. All are free, searchable by name.
