Local authority pay scales in Ireland

Every grade side by side

13 grades covered so far, ordered by starting salary. The ceiling column includes any long service increments, and the years column is how long it takes to get there.

Where the ladder overlaps

Promotion always raises your ceiling and your pension. What it does not always do is raise your pay on the day it happens, because the grade you leave can pay more at the top than the grade you join pays at the bottom.

The administrative ladder

On 4 of these 5 steps the top of the lower grade pays more than the first point of the grade above it.

The engineering ladder

Every one of these 5 steps overlaps. On each of them the top of the lower grade pays more than the first point of the grade above it.

Ceilings include any long service increment, which is what you reach by staying, not by being promoted. Someone who has not yet earned theirs sees a smaller overlap than the table shows.

How pay works in this sector

Local authority pay is national. The same point pays the same in every county and city council in the country, with no Dublin weighting. The one exception is the Chief Executive, whose salary is banded by the size of the authority, from €168,954 in the smaller counties to €241,361 for Dublin City.

A council runs two separate career lines that do not feed into each other. The administrative ladder is numbered, Grade 3 up to Grade 7 and then Senior Executive Officer. The engineering ladder is named, from Graduate Engineer up to County Engineer. Someone on one does not get promoted onto the other, which is why the two are shown separately above.

Most grades carry two long service increments, but Grade 3 has only one, and Graduate Engineer and Director of Service have none at all, so their scales simply end. That matters when you compare ceilings: a grade with no increment tops out where its last ordinary point sits, while its neighbour keeps climbing for another six years without a promotion.

Director of Service sits above both ladders rather than at the end of either. It is a management post that can be reached from the administrative side or the engineering side, so it is left out of the two sequences above rather than presented as the next step from one of them.

If you are comparing a council job with one in the health service, the numbered grades line up remarkably closely. A local authority Grade 5 and an HSE Grade V sit within a handful of euro of each other at both ends of the scale, even though they are set by different circulars and are not interchangeable.

Questions people ask most

Pick a grade

Every grade in this sector, including any kept out of the table above because their pay is not a salary.