Delayed NJ Authority Payroll Data Shows $82.3M in Overtime and an Apparent $1.42M Error

New Jersey released its first look at 2026 authority payrolls Tuesday, covering what 15 independent state orgs paid employees through March. The file includes more than 17,000 payroll records and $414.74M in total earnings, with $273.74M in regular pay and $82.3M in overtime.

NJ Transit and the Turnpike Authority are where most of that money landed; making up for more than 90% of the payroll records and 91.5% of earnings and 99.45.% of overtime.

NJ Transit showed $65.65M in overtime during the first three months of the year- about 21% of its payroll and the Turnpike Authority came in at $16.19M – 25.3% of its earnings.

There were also 782 records where overtime was higher than regular pay during the quarter with NJ Transit accounting for 753 of them and $14.89M of the overtime tied to those records.

The five largest individual overtime payments in the 2026 records all went to Transit employees.

We should keep in mind that transit operates around the clock and a whole slew of folks (police, conductors, engineers, track workers etc) need to cover emergencies, open positions, another persons sick or vacation time on top of what they normally do. Without context, which isn’t provided here, we can’t jump to any conclusions but it’s a fair place to begin asking questions.

But, if you are thinking this is world cup related, remember those matches didn’t start until June 13.

Then there’s the catch-all category- ‘all other payments’ where the two largest 2026 payments in the data sat resided.

Nicholas Mammano is listed as a senior adviser at the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority, received ~$167K through March; about $108K of that amount was listed as other payments. Mammano was the Authority’s president and CEO in 2025.

He announced his last meeting as president and CEO of the NJSEA during the Jan 22 meeting , the Board authorized an amendment to his contract as part of the transition after deciding on a replacement.

A crew supervisor for the Turnpike got ~$135K through March; $131K of that landed in the other-payments category. Last year it was flipped showing he made $130,093 in regular pay, $28,3.86 in overtime and $4,056 in other payments.

The state’s definition of ‘all other payments’ are wages that aren’t regular pay or overtime but there isn’t a break down outside of that so we can’t tell if it includes built up time off, catch-up pay, contract-related payments, separation pay sitting all sitting under the same label.

There were also issues with the report itself and the CRDA is where we found one of them.

Every one of the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority’s payroll records repeats the employee’s regular pay in the “all other payments” column. Combined, they show $1,417,638.81 in regular pay and the exact same amount in other payments.

This didn’t affect YTD earnings but the raw “all other payments” column for all 2026 appears to be over by about $1.4M

And we’ll end with the timing….

The state calls this database a quarterly release, but its 1Q data wasn’t posted until August – four months after the quarter ended- and doesn’t include snapshots from last years first quarter which means we can’t make a clean comparison between 2025 and 2026.

The year-end numbers do give us some context.

Overtime increased from~$257M in 2024 to ~$284M in 2025- +~$27M or +10.4%.

Total earnings rose from $1.56 billion to $1.73 billion during the same period- +~ $169M or 10.9%.

We should learn more about this year’s pace with the next release.

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