How to Find Out Someone's Salary

The short answer

If the person works for a US federal, state, county, city, school district, or public university — their salary is a public record and you can look it up by name in under a minute. If they work in the private sector, their exact salary is not public; the best you can do is an estimate from occupation + location + employer data. This guide covers both.

Jump to

• Federal employees
• California (Transparent California)
• All 50 states
• Private-sector salaries
• Corporate executives (SEC filings)
• FAQ

Federal employees

For US federal civilian employees, use FedsDataCenter or FederalPay.org. Both pull directly from OPM's FedScope disclosures. You get name, agency, position title, grade/step, and base pay. Postal Service, intelligence, and some judicial employees are excluded by statute.

California — the Transparent California playbook

Transparent California is the largest single public-payroll database in the country. It covers roughly 2 million California state, county, city, school district, and special district employees, run by the nonprofit Nevada Policy Research Institute.

How to use it:

1. Search by name, agency, or job title from the homepage.
2. Filter by year — data is usually available within one year of the fiscal close.
3. Click a record for the full breakdown: base pay, overtime, "other pay" (allowances, cash-outs, bonuses), and the total employer cost of benefits.
4. Cross-reference the same person across multiple years to see raises, promotions, or overtime patterns.

What's not there: University of California employees have their own portal at UC Annual Wage. K–12 teacher pay is included but individual classroom teachers are sometimes grouped by district scale.

All 50 states — official transparency portals

Every state now runs an official salary or checkbook portal. Coverage and search UX vary — some let you type a name; others require an agency filter first. When the official portal is clunky, a nonprofit aggregator (linked when it exists) is usually faster.

Private-sector salaries — what actually works

Private employers do not disclose individual pay. Anyone who tells you they can pull a specific private-sector paycheck is either guessing or breaking the law. What you can do:

• BLS OEWS — the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics gives median, 10th, 25th, 75th, and 90th percentile pay by occupation and metro area. Free at bls.gov/oes.
• Self-reported aggregators — Levels.fyi, Glassdoor, Payscale, LinkedIn Salary. Good for tech and finance; noisy elsewhere.
• Pay-transparency job posts — CA, CO, NY, WA, and a growing list of states now require salary ranges on job postings. Look up the person's employer and role.
• Personpages AI estimates — for a specific named person, our model combines occupation, employer, city, and age into a plausible annual range. It is an estimate, not a verified figure. Try a lookup.

Corporate executives — SEC filings

Named Executive Officers at US publicly traded companies must disclose compensation in the annual DEF 14A proxy statement. Search a company's filings on SEC EDGAR and look for the "Summary Compensation Table" — salary, bonus, stock awards, option awards, and total comp for the CEO, CFO, and top three other officers.

FAQ