I have to be honest I am a bit skeptical at that. That is more than a 2 star general with 20 years of experience gets. I know there are special pay bonuses but I have never heard of any that high. How did they manage to get a 200k salary for a role given the military/government's pay schedule?
Base pay O-4 plus San Diego BAH for O-4 with dependent (adjust this for tax advantage), plus BAS, plus sub pay, plus sea pay, plus annual 40k COBO (and maybe add 1500 to that because it's 50k, then 40k repeats for the next 5 years.)
I'll have to do the math later, but it's pretty close to 200k, before any consideration of other benefits.
Edit: for the San Diego case, it's 209,000 before counting any tax advantages; 230,000 if you do some basic back calculations on BAH for federal income tax and payroll taxes; and it's actually even more tax-efficient than that, when you consider that you can be a resident of a state with 0% income tax. All this to say that monetary compensation has diminishing returns from a retention perspective.
Ah, I had assumed that was base pay + role adjustment and not with all the other normal allowances, my comparison to an O-8 was on base pay alone.
I think with that information my point still holds. I am taking and easy role and living at the edge of a major metro area(so lower cost of living) and pulling in 200k. With “sea pay” I assume you are on boats for a time? Also all the strict regimentation that comes with the military jobs(the UCMJ is a lot stricter than regular law). The military can’t pay as well as civilian jobs they need to pay significantly higher because they are asking for significantly more.
For instance would you have been as willing to walk away from the role if it was paying 500k? If you were then maybe you just hated the life but given how many people I knew in ROTC who admitted they joined solely out of financial considerations, I doubt a pay difference like that wouldn’t significantly affect retention rates and recruitment
>With “sea pay” I assume you are on boats for a time?
Generally, yes. One could expect to spend somewhere between 0 and 65% of his entire 3 year tour out to sea.
>Also all the strict regimentation that comes with the military jobs(the UCMJ is a lot stricter than regular law).
This is basically not a problem, though with notable 2020 exceptions.
>For instance would you have been as willing to walk away from the role if it was paying 500k?
All other things being held constant, I'd have stuck around for that, yeah. But I think the military could fill those jobs much more cheaply if they got other stuff right. Some of it results from byzantine regulation that will never be corrected, but there are lots of changes that could yield huge improvements to quality of life for cheaper than doubling salaries. I'll also say that it's a cool job with a sense of meaning that I perceive to be generally missing from workplaces, based on discussions here and elsewhere. In the end, though, the time away from my kids is too high a cost for all that.
