Long Island town officials' pay raises for 2025: A look at whose salaries climbed in the past year

As most Long Island towns hiked property taxes beyond the tax cap this year, most elected officials saw their paychecks rise: Among Long Island's 13 towns, all but three gave raises to their town supervisors and council members, and all but two gave raises to their town clerks and tax receivers, according to a Newsday analysis. 

The salary increases come as, for the first time since the tax cap was implemented in 2012, a majority of Long Island towns — nine of the 13 — voted to pierce it in 2025. That compares to three towns last year. 

Although pandemic-era inflation has faded, federal COVID-19 aid that helped boost local budgets has ended, and Long Island officials have said they faced increased costs for health care and pensions. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported last month that private-sector wages increased by 3.8% in the 12-month period that ended in December, a rise that followed wage gains of 4.3% during the same period in 2023. 

Newsday analyzed the 2025 pay increases for all supervisors, town board members, town clerks and receivers of taxes for the Island's towns.

Percentage-wise, the Brookhaven clerk and the Shelter Island receiver of taxes receive the largest year-over-year pay hikes of the Island's elected officials, at 11.8% and 9.8%, respectively. In two towns, North Hempstead and Huntington, salaries remain the same across the board, as they were in 2024.

The three highest-paid elected town officials on Long Island this year are Hempstead Town Supervisor Donald Clavin Jr., $179,375; Brookhaven Town Supervisor Dan Panico, $173,040; and Huntington Town Supervisor Edmund J. Smyth, $162,903. Clavin and Panico received raises while Smyth did not.

Supervisors' pay raises for 2025 average about 2.3%, data shows. 

Panico, who received a 3% increase in Brookhaven, said that decisions about raises there — how much and how frequently they are given — are "dependent on the current economic situation. ... Inflation, the cost of living, affects everyone." 

"I run a town that is geographically bigger than Nassau County, with a half-million residents," he said. "It's an important job and the salary is commensurate with the work."

Smyth said the last salary increases for elected officials in Huntington were in 2009 and 2013.

“Huntington has held a tight rein on its budget over the years,” he said. “We have said no to a lot, and that includes raises for elected officials. ... The benefit has been a $10.5 million budget surplus in 2023 and a 2025 budget that fell within the state tax cap."

David Schleicher, a law professor at Yale Law School who specializes in local and state finance, said that it’s important to pay elected officials enough so that they are focused on their work. 

“It’s a broad academic belief, among academics at least, that elected officials are underpaid,” he said, citing their influence on the economy and people's lives. “... The money spent on political figures and their staff makes them a little bit more professional, which makes them a little more immune to [conflicts of] interests.”

A shift toward smaller, annual raises

Towns have largely shifted toward giving out regular, small pay increases rather than keeping salaries flat for years and then adopting a large raise every few years to catch up.

Last year, Hempstead and Oyster Bay amended their town codes to create automatic pay raises for elected officials, a change that avoids the need — and optics — to vote on future raises.

Lawrence Levy, executive dean of the National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University, said in an email that the issue of raises for elected officials “is almost always political.”

Many officials like the idea of telling voters each year that they aren’t getting a pay hike, but that means when they do enact a raise, the increase will be a big dollar amount, even if its average, over 10 years, is in line with cost-of-living increases, Levy said.

That big increase “looks awfully scary in a headline,” Levy said.

“It has always seemed to make more sense, both fiscally for budgeting certainty and politically for the small numbers involved, for electeds to build in a cost-of-living increase each year,” Levy said.

Over the past decade, town supervisors’ salaries have increased by an average of 20.85%, a Newsday analysis shows. On a percentage basis, the biggest salary increases for that position over that span were in Brookhaven with a 54.36% increase, Southampton with a 41.13% increase, and Smithtown with a 39.27% increase. The lowest changes in supervisor salaries since 2016 were Huntington with 0%, North Hempstead with 0.38% and Riverhead with 3.27%.

Ken Girardin, director of research at the Albany-based Empire Center for Public Policy, a fiscally conservative think tank, said that it's the voters who decide whether elected officials' raises are appropriate. 

"This boils down to being a political question," Girardin said. "If somebody wants to make an argument against an incumbent based on how much they are getting paid or the size of the raise they've given themselves, that's entirely fair; that's how we settle questions like this."

Elected officials' salaries generally tend to correlate with population size, though there are exceptions. The supervisors of Hempstead and Brookhaven — Long Island's two largest towns, according to U.S. Census estimates for 2023 — have the highest salaries. Yet Islip, the third-largest town on the Island according to census data, pays its supervisor near the bottom, with the 10th-highest salary. 

Brookhaven, after years of modest annual increases, enacted large salary hikes last February for the supervisor and town board. Those hikes raised Panico's salary to $168,000 from $135,527, a 24% increase compared to 2023.

Panico said at the time that the raises were for additional compensation for elected officials to take over the duties of a planning board and accessory apartment review board that were disbanded, as Newsday previously reported. 

Riverhead scaled back a proposal to increase the supervisor’s salary by 8.7% and town board members’ by 7.5%, instead opting for a 3.3% increase for both positions that Town Supervisor Tim Hubbard said is in line with what town employees are owed under their union contracts. Before those increases, salaries for Riverhead’s supervisor and town board members had not gone up in more than a decade.

“Elected officials obviously still have to make a living,” Hubbard said.

Part-time town board posts

While town supervisor, town clerk and receiver of taxes are usually full-time jobs, town council member is typically a part-time position. A council member may work dozens of days each month, or fewer than 10, and still get the same pay.

Town boards approve a record of average days worked per month, called a standard work day resolution, which is reported to the state comptroller's office.

For example, standard work day resolutions show that last year, North Hempstead Councilwoman Chau-Yi (Christine) Liu, whose salary is $49,000, reported working an average of 27.77 days per month. In contrast, Hempstead Councilman Christopher Schneider, whose salary is $79,950, reported working an average of 8.34 days per month. 

In January of last year, days after being sworn in for new terms, Oyster Bay legislators enacted large raises that hadn’t been included in the budget and amended their town codes to make annual raises automatic. Beginning this year, Oyster Bay’s supervisor, clerk and tax receiver will receive automatic annual raises of $2,500, while council members will receive automatic $1,500 annual increases. 

Oyster Bay officials did not respond to requests for comment on the rationale for automatic raises.

In Hempstead, automatic raises for elected officials pegged to the lesser of the inflation rate or 4.9% were included in an amendment to the town code adopted in December 2023 that also included a large pay increase in 2024. 

Town of Hempstead spokesman Brian Devine declined to comment on the rationale, stating that the issue had been previously addressed. 

Both Hempstead and Oyster Bay’s elected officials hadn’t received raises in more than a decade, Newsday previously reported.

Schleicher, the Yale professor, said that paying elected officials well means that their work can be done as a job rather than “a rich person doing it as hobby.”

“If they're not happy with their job, they can do lots of things that make things a lot worse,” he said.

CORRECTION: A previous version of this story misstated the pay raise of Brookhaven Supervisor Dan Panico.