Dearest reader,

This one took a while. A very long while.

Lady Budgetdown has been working through a massive statewide payroll database, and I finally have something you can actually explore instead of staring at thousands upon thousands of rows in a spreadsheet.

The map shows the three highest-paid employees reported in the 2025 payroll data for each Michigan public school district included in the dataset.

That's it. No judgment about who should or should not be there. No selecting people based on job titles. No deciding whether someone is overpaid or underpaid. I simply took the reported payroll data, sorted each district from highest to lowest, and pulled the top three.

I also included each district's 2024–25 Average Teacher Salary and Pupil Count FTE from Michigan Bulletin 1014 to give those payroll numbers some context.

A couple of important things before we go down this rabbit hole:

"Pay" is the amount reported in the 2025 payroll database. It may not be the same thing as contractual base salary.

And this is a HUGE dataset. There may be missing records. There may be mistakes in the underlying data. And despite a lot of checking, there may even be a mistake I made while putting all of this together. This took a tremendous amount of time to build, and I would much rather correct something than pretend a giant database is incapable of having an error.

So if you find something that doesn't look right, let me know. Bring me the receipt, point me toward the record, and I will check it. If it's wrong, I'll correct it publicly.

Being on this map does not mean someone is doing anything wrong. It doesn't mean they're overpaid. It doesn't mean they're underpaid.

It means they were among the three highest-paid employees reported for that district in the data.

Click your county. Find your district. Follow the numbers wherever they take you.

With receipts and respect.

https://www.datawrapper.de/_/VNQ3q/

#LadyBudgetdown #MichiganSchools #SchoolFinance #PublicRecords #Transparency #FollowTheMoney