Step-by-step instructions for searching Nevada government salaries and pensions on Transparent Nevada. Find any public employee, agency, or job title in minutes.
Transparent Nevada holds millions of public records. Finding exactly what you are looking for takes about two minutes once you know how the search works. This guide walks you through every method, including a few shortcuts that most people miss.
The simplest search. Go to transparentnevada.com and type a name into the main search bar.
A few tips that will save you frustration:
Use last name only first. If you search "John Smith" and get no results, try searching just "Smith." The database may store the name slightly differently than you expect.
Do not include middle names or initials. Payroll systems vary by agency. Some include middle initials, some do not. Searching a last name gives you the widest net.
Check your spelling. This sounds obvious, but government payroll records sometimes contain the name as the agency entered it, which is not always how the employee spells it. If you are unsure, try a partial name.
Select a year if you know it. If you are looking for someone's salary from a specific year, selecting that year from the dropdown before searching will speed things up considerably.
Want to see what all the school principals in Nevada earn? Or what a deputy sheriff makes across different counties? Searching by job title is the fastest way to make those comparisons.
Type the job title into the search bar. Use broad terms first. "Principal" will return more results than "Assistant Principal for Curriculum." You can always narrow from there.
Job titles are not standardized across agencies, so the same role might be listed as "Police Officer," "Police Officer I," or "Patrol Officer" depending on the agency. If your first search comes up short, try a variant.
Sometimes you do not have a specific name or title in mind. You just want to see what a particular city, county, school district, or state agency pays across the board.
From the homepage, click Agencies in the top navigation. You will see salary and pension records organized by agency type:
Cities includes Las Vegas, Henderson, Reno, and every other incorporated city in the state.
Counties includes all 17 Nevada counties.
State Government includes all state agencies, departments, and offices.
University Systems includes the University of Nevada system campuses.
K-12 School Districts includes all public school districts.
Charter Schools are listed separately from traditional public school districts.
Special Districts covers water districts, fire protection districts, transit agencies, and other single-purpose government entities. These are often overlooked but sometimes have some of the highest compensation levels in the state.
Clicking any agency takes you to a full list of employees with all available years of data.
Salary records and pension records are two separate databases. If you are looking for what a retired public employee receives in pension payments, go to Pensions in the top navigation.
The pension search works the same way as the salary search. You can look up by name, job title, or browse by pension plan. Nevada's main pension system is PERS (the Public Employees' Retirement System), but there are additional pension plans for specific categories of employees, including judges and legislators, which you can find under Pension Agencies.
The year is not in our database yet. Salary data is updated annually after agencies respond to public records requests. If a recent year is not available, it is likely in process.
The agency is very small. Tiny special districts occasionally have limited or delayed reporting.
The employee worked for a private contractor, not the government. Only direct government employees appear in this database. If someone is employed by a private company that contracts with a government agency, their pay would not be in public payroll records.
You are searching the wrong database. Active employees appear in salary records. Retirees appear in pension records. Make sure you are looking in the right place.
Once you have a record, you can sort results by total pay and benefits, regular pay, or other pay to make comparisons across employees at the same agency. Sorting by total pay and benefits gives you the most complete picture of what each position actually costs taxpayers.
If you need data that goes beyond what is available through the public search, the Records Request page lets researchers and journalists request custom datasets for academic or journalistic purposes.
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