NEW YORK — The NYPD is on track to spend nearly $1 billion on police overtime this fiscal year — a clear sign the department has made little headway on Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s goal of driving down the entrenched form of spending.
According to a new internal projection provided to POLITICO, the police department expects to spend $955 million on overtime pay for officers through the 2026 fiscal year, which ends June 30. As of late March, the department had already spent $758 million on overtime this fiscal year, a separate set of data shows.
The new expenditure projection is effectively flat compared to the $960 million the NYPD spent on overtime in the last fiscal year, which concluded in June 2025 when Eric Adams was still mayor. The projection also reflects an increase from just a couple months ago when the department estimated in March that it was going to spend $880 million on overtime this fiscal year — though an NYPD spokesperson suggested Wednesday that the March estimate was supposed to be slightly higher.
The apparent inability to put a dent in the NYPD’s overtime budget, at least for now, presents the mayor with a vexing political dilemma — given that his base and progressive allies in the City Council have long demanded that the outlay be reduced.
Councilmember Tiffany Cabán, a Mamdani ally and fellow democratic socialist, told POLITICO it’s a problem that police overtime spending isn’t trending downward significantly — a dig she aimed not at the mayor, but at his police commissioner, Jessica Tisch.
“Commisioner Tisch said reducing NYPD overtime spending was a ‘top priority.’ While we haven’t seen any reduction in overtime spending, we’ve seen NYPD prioritize an astronomical increase in the criminalization of poverty, including arrests of people sleeping on the subway,” said Cabán, who sits on the Council’s Criminal Justice Committee and is a co-chair of the chamber's Progressive Caucus. “That’s $1 billion of our money that’s being pilfered by NYPD through their unchecked bloated overtime spending that could be going towards healthcare, schools and social services.”
A spokesperson for Mamdani — who took office Jan. 1 and has only had a say over the NYPD purse strings for a portion of the current fiscal year — did not comment.
The issue of rising NYPD overtime spending is fraught for the democratic socialist mayor.
While he campaigned last year on promises to slash police overtime spending, he’s also pushed for hosting a number of large-scale events throughout the city during this summer’s World Cup. Such events come with a need for increased police coverage, which tends to translate into more overtime spending.
On the flipside, Mamdani has scrambled to find ways to shave city spending amid a multibillion-dollar municipal government deficit that has hampered his policy agenda.
On Tuesday, he released an executive city budget he was only able to balance using controversial fiscal techniques like deferring contributions to the municipal pension funds. The fact that Mamdani has opted to close the budget gap by such unconventional steps — instead of curbing police overtime — stands to anger his hard-left allies. And the criticism from Cabán hints at an early warning sign on that front.
Exorbitant overtime spending at the NYPD has long been controversial. Because of protests and unforeseen emergencies, the department regularly blows through its allotted overtime budget every year. The actual budgeted amount for police overtime in fiscal year 2026 was $487.7 million — meaning the department is on pace to exceed its allotted amount by nearly 100 percent under the freshest projection.
On Wednesday, an NYPD spokesperson argued the latest increase in the projected overtime spending for this fiscal year isn’t as steep as it seems. Without disputing the $880 million figure that POLITICO first reported in March, the spokesperson said that’s because the actual projection from the time was supposed to be $929 million.
Even under that projection, that means the new estimate of $955 million amounts to an increase. But the NYPD spokesperson argued there hasn’t actually been an uptick because the latest increase comes from realizing $44 million in new overtime funding for the NYPD bankrolled by federal and state grants.
Regardless, the NYPD’s overtime spending has remained elevated even as Mamdani and Tisch have listed reining in it as a priority.
As a mayoral candidate last year, Mamdani distanced himself from past comments he had made about a need to “defund” the NYPD. But he also made it a centerpiece of his public safety agenda to decrease NYPD overtime spending, arguing it’s gobbling up money that could be used to fund alternative public safety response models.
After being named police commissioner by Adams in late 2024, Tisch said she was also focused on addressing the department’s skyrocketing overtime budget.
“We have articulated very clear overtime controls, and reiterated that it is the responsibility of managers and certainly executive leaders in this department to manage and focus on overtime,” she said in January 2025, when the NYPD had been rocked by allegations that former Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey had given a subordinate overtime pay in exchange for sex.
While overtime spending has remained high at the NYPD, statistics for serious crime in the city continue to trend downward.
The NYPD has touted that the first quarter of 2026 marked the safest first quarter for shootings and murders in the city since the department started keeping track of such statistics, and police officials are crediting that trend to an increase in hiring officers. However, as reported by the New York Post, murders in the city’s subway system are going up even amid broader dips in crime.
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