Best and Worst Cities for Police in 2025

Best and Worst Cities for Police

When deciding where to live, you don’t look at factors like housing costs, jobs, or schools in a vacuum. You consider all the factors together to determine which location is best for you.

Similarly, we weighed several factors to determine where police officers fare the best and worst. We examined salaries, affordability, safety, and staffing and scored each of the 300+ metro areas we analyzed based on these criteria.

The top-scoring cities offer the best quality of life for police officers. In the lowest-scoring cities, policing is more dangerous and less lucrative.

Top 20 Best Cities for Police

Major urban hubs dominate the best cities list. California metro areas are particularly well-ranked, making up 10 out of the top 20 metros for police officers. These locations offer a combination of higher salaries, safer conditions, and stronger staffing, though affordability challenges persist.

Getting hired as a police officer in one of these places can have a significant upside. In Fremont, California, part of the San Jose metro area, the police department recently announced a jaw-dropping $100,000 sign-on bonus for experienced police officers. Another Bay Area city, Alameda, offered a $75,000 sign-on bonus.

Columbus, Ohio is a noteworthy outlier on our top list. As the only midwestern city aside from Chicago to make the rankings, it’s also the only one with a cost of living lower than the national average, meaning a police officer’s salary may stretch further here than in any other location.

20 Worst Cities for Police

Southern metro areas were the only ones to rank among the worst cities to be a police officer. Low salaries paired with low affordability, higher crime, and staffing struggles make these markets more challenging places to work and live.

Louisiana alone accounts for four of the top 20 spots. This is not unexpected considering the state’s overall crime profile and income levels. The state has one of the highest rates of violent crime in the U.S. and the second-lowest household income.

In the sections ahead, we’ll explore the factors that vaulted these cities to the top and bottom of our rankings.

Police Salaries and Affordability

Right now, many Americans find it challenging to make ends meet. The inflation-adjusted cost of living is higher than in the past, and incomes in most industries aren’t keeping pace. In a recent Pew Research Center survey, 69 percent of Americans said they were “very concerned” about the cost of housing, while 70 percent said the same about the cost of food and consumer goods.

With this in mind, it’s easy to see why salary would be a high priority if you’re looking for a job as a police officer. Good news: when you compare salaries across all professions for the entire country, police officers generally earn a comfortable living.

Police Salary Range in the U.S.

Source: 2024 BLS data

In our analysis, 30 U.S. metros had median police incomes of $100,000 or more. However, all five of the highest-paying markets for police officers are in California. As anyone who’s ever lived in a high-cost-of-living area knows, salary alone doesn’t tell the whole story about a person’s buying power. The cost of living in a particular area makes a significant impact.

Most Affordable Metros for Police

Based on Costs of Living and Buying Power of Annual Median Income, 2025

According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, the median annual salary for a police officer is $76,300. That’s 12 percent higher than the median income for all occupations (nearly $68,000). However, there’s a significant disparity in police officer salaries based on geographical location. The spread between the nation’s highest- and lowest-paid officers is over $100,000.

Least Affordable Metros for Police

Based on Costs of Living and Buying Power of Annual Median Income, 2025

While western metros dominate in police buying power, the southern U.S. falls to the bottom of the list. This might be a surprise because the cost of living is lower in the South than in other parts of the country. However, lower living costs can mean employees feel less urgency to negotiate for higher pay than they would in areas where costs are steeper. Workers in the South have also earned less than their counterparts in the rest of the country for more than four decades, meaning wage growth has been lower over time.

Employees in southern states are less likely to receive benefits like employer-sponsored health coverage and pensions than in other regions, which means salaries have to stretch further to cover the difference. Finally, the South has the country’s lowest rate of union participation–something that can be a significant factor in securing higher wages.

Force Size and Staffing

Over 666,000 people work as police officers across the country, but they are not spread equally from coast to coast. Another factor to consider when examining the best and worst cities for police officers is the availability of jobs. How many officers does each city employ?

National Police Force Size Range

Source: 2024 BLS

Among the hundreds of metro areas we studied, the median force size is 500 officers, ranging from 54,000+ employed in the New York metro area to under 100 in Walla Walla, Washington.

Officer density is an interesting metric to consider, too. It measures how many officers are employed compared to the overall population.

Metro Areas with the Highest Number of Police Officers Per Resident (2025)

It’s counterintuitive, but a higher officer density doesn’t always mean a safer workplace. In fact, the opposite tends to be true. Six of the ten metro areas listed above have a higher rate of violent crime than the national average, according to FBI data. More crime can equal a higher need for a heavier police presence, hence, more officers.

Metro Areas with the Lowest Number of Police Officers Per Resident (2025)

Low officer density can be related to safety–Provo, Utah, for example, has incredibly low levels of violent crime–but it can also indicate an area’s broader attitudes toward policing.

Portland, Oregon, illustrates this. In recent years, the city has prioritized strengthening community relations and providing officers with more development opportunities rather than increasing the number of patrols on the streets. The city recently opted to redirect $2.2 million from its Police Bureau’s budget to a broader array of public safety agencies.

When examining the size of an area’s police force, it’s important to consider context and not just hard numbers.

Conclusion

Life as a police officer can be a thankless and sometimes very dangerous one. However, for officers who are in it for the right reasons–like protecting the public, serving the common good, and making the community a better place–it’s possible to take the negative aspects of the job in stride.

A high quality of life can make the job more worthwhile, too. That’s why it’s important to fully consider every aspect of a city, including pay, affordability, safety, and staffing, when determining the best and worst cities to be a police officer.

Methodology and Data

This study evaluated how metropolitan areas across the United States compare in terms of safety, affordability, and career opportunities for police and sheriff’s patrol officers. To achieve this, we developed a composite scoring framework that integrates statewide officer safety outcomes with metro-level measures of income, cost of living, and workforce opportunity. The methodology balances rigor and fairness by standardizing all metrics on a consistent scale, ensuring that no single measure dominates the results.

Officer safety data were obtained from the FBI’s Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted (LEOKA) database, covering the years 2019 through 2023. These data include felonious deaths and accidental deaths, which were combined into a weighted Danger Score. To normalize risk across states, we divided these scores by the number of officer-years to calculate a Danger Rate. Because safety data are only available at the state level, we applied a smoothing process to assign scores to individual MSAs.

This method blends state-level Danger Rates with the national average, weighted by the size of each MSA’s police force. Large MSAs, therefore, reflect their state conditions more closely, while smaller MSAs avoid distortion from rare but severe events. The resulting adjusted Danger Rates were then scaled into a normalized Safety Score, with higher scores reflecting safer environments.

Affordability was calculated at the MSA level using 2024 occupational median annual wage estimates for police and sheriff’s patrol officers (SOC 33-3051) from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in conjunction with cost-of-living estimates derived from the Bureau of Economic Analysis’s 2024 Regional Price Parities (RPP). Real income was calculated as the median wage divided by local RPP (indexed to 100). This measure was standardized using z-scores to compare relative purchasing power across all metropolitan areas.

Opportunity was derived from employment measures, combining officer density (the number of sworn officers relative to the population, based on 2024 Census Bureau estimates) and workforce scale (the log of total officers employed in an MSA). These were standardized with z-scores and weighted to emphasize officer density (70 percent) over workforce scale (30 percent), yielding a comprehensive Opportunity Score.

The final overall metric was a weighted combination of the three subscores: 30 percent safety, 45 percent affordability, and 25 percent opportunity. Each component was normalized to a 50–100 scale, producing an interpretable and fair index of conditions for officers across the nation’s metropolitan areas. We assigned letter grades for ease of comparison.