Chicago City Employee Payroll and Costing Records

24 payroll periods of detailed payroll costing data for City of Chicago employees, extracted from the Financial Management and Purchasing System (FMPS). The dataset includes employee identifiers, pay elements, departmental funds, and payment amounts, provided by the City of Chicago's data portal.

Use Cases

• Analyze departmental spending trends by aggregating AMOUNT by DEPARTMENT and PAYROLL PERIOD.
• Identify compensation structures by examining PAY ELEMENT distributions across different JOB TITLEs.
• Track fund allocation by joining APPROPRIATION CODE with FUND CODE for fiscal reporting.
• Deduplicate employee records for accurate per-person analysis using the unique EMPLOYEE DATASET ID.
• Audit payroll period consistency by comparing PAYROLL YEAR and PAYROLL PERIOD sequences.

Strengths

• Includes 17 distinct columns covering employee, financial, and organizational dimensions.
• Contains all pay elements from the FMPS Payroll Costing module, not a subset.
• Provides a unique EMPLOYEE DATASET ID for accurate employee-level aggregation.

Limitations

• Represents a point-in-time extract and may not reflect real-time or reconciled financial data.
• Row count and total size are unknown, limiting assessment of statistical power.
• Employee names are not unique, requiring careful use of the identifier to avoid duplication.

Provenance

Source

City of Chicago Financial Management and Purchasing System (FMPS).

Collection Method

Extracted from the Payroll Costing module of the FMPS system.

Time Range

Organized into 24 payroll periods per year.

Freshness

Last updated March 2026.

Geography

City of Chicago municipal government.