Compare California sheriff department costs

Sheriff department cost and staffing across all 58 counties. Click a column header to sort. Hover a column header to see what it measures. Data as of 2026-08-12.

A note on data vintages and definitions. Population is the US Census Bureau's 2018–2022 American Community Survey 5-year estimate. Budgets are the most recent fiscal year each county reported, typically FY 2023–24 (year ending June 30, 2024). San Francisco's budget is from the City and County of San Francisco's FY 2023–24 Annual Appropriation Ordinance. Counties don't change population or sheriff appropriation by very much year-to-year, so the per-resident figures are reasonably comparable, but small differences (a few percent) between counties may reflect vintage rather than underlying spending decisions. Staffing categories come from the California State Controller's Office Government Compensation in California (GCC) dataset for calendar year 2024 — each employee is classified by job title into sworn (peace officer classifications), custody (jail/detention staff), or civilian (clerks, analysts, dispatchers, technicians, medical, programs, and other support roles). In counties where the GCC dataset lists a separate jail or detention sub-department (e.g., Alameda's "Det & Corr" unit, Napa's "Corr" division), all employees in that sub-department are counted as custody regardless of job title, because most California sheriffs assign jail duty to deputies classified as "Deputy Sheriff" rather than as "Correctional Officer." In counties where all sheriff employees appear under a single department (e.g., Sacramento, Los Angeles), custody is counted from job titles only, which may undercount jail deputies who carry the "Deputy Sheriff" title. Alpine County contracts jail operations to a neighboring county and shows 0 custody staff. Sonoma and San Francisco cannot be identified in the county-level GCC export (Sonoma files all employees under the county-wide name; San Francisco is a consolidated city-county), so their staffing figures come from the Sonoma County FY 2023-24 Adopted Budget and the San Francisco FY 2023-24 Annual Appropriations Ordinance.