Public safetyRead at source, 23 September 2026

Police officer shortage: what the 2026 data shows, and how agencies recruit

The police officer shortage is now less about hiring and more about the gap that opened after 2020. In PERF’s 2026 workforce survey of 197 agencies, sworn staffing rose 1.4 percent in 2025 and agencies hired 17.6 percent more officers than in 2024 — yet total staffing only climbed back to its 2022 level and is still below 2020. Nationally, the Bureau of Labor Statistics counts 693,200 police and sheriff’s patrol officers and projects about 60,100 openings a year for police and detectives through 2035, many of them replacing people who retire or leave. Agencies that are closing the gap are the ones that shortened the hiring process and started recruiting people who were not looking for a police job.

The police officer shortage in numbers

Two data sets describe the shortage from different ends. BLS describes the size of the occupation and how many seats open each year. PERF describes what is happening inside agencies: how many officers they hire, and how many they lose.

Source: BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook, police and detectives and public safety telecommunicators pages. The openings figure for officers is published for police and detectives combined (824,200 employed in 2025).

Growth is not the problem. Three percent over ten years is ordinary. The 60,100 openings a year against 824,200 police and detectives employed is a replacement need of roughly 7 percent of the workforce annually, and BLS attributes many of those openings to people moving to other occupations or retiring.

The hole was dug between 2020 and 2023. PERF’s 2025 survey found that total staffing fell 5.4 percent from January 1, 2020, to January 1, 2023, then held roughly steady to January 2025. The 1.4 percent gain in 2025 brought staffing back to its 2022 level, not its 2020 level.

Hiring has recovered faster than staffing. Respondents hired 40 percent more officers in 2025 than in 2021. Resignations were 15 percent lower than in 2021, but retirements rose 16.4 percent from 2024 to 2025. More hires are going in, and a growing retirement wave is taking a share of them straight back out.

Why smaller agencies are recovering faster

PERF split its results by size. Large agencies (250 or more officers) grew about 1.4 percent in 2025 after two flat years; medium and small agencies have grown staffing by at least 7.5 percent since 2022. Large agencies also made the biggest hiring gains, 42 percent more hires in 2025 than in 2021, which suggests their constraint is losing officers rather than finding them.

Competition has also moved up the pay scale. PERF notes federal agencies offering signing bonuses as high as $70,000 or $75,000. A municipal department cannot match that, and does not need to for most of its candidates: the people who will take a patrol job in a town of 30,000 mostly want to stay in or near that town. That is an interpretation, but it shapes where recruiting money is best spent — locally, on people who already live there.

What agencies have changed, according to the data

PERF points to what agencies have changed: signing bonuses, lower educational requirements, streamlined hiring processes, retention bonuses, staff dedicated to retention and, in some agencies, child care. Grouped by what they fix, the law enforcement recruitment strategies that hold up are these.

Widen who can apply

• Review education requirements against the job. PERF lists lowering educational requirements among the changes agencies have made; a degree requirement that was never tied to performance removes local candidates for no return.
• Sponsor recruits through the academy with pay from day one. It turns the role into an entry-level job for someone with a mortgage.
• Recruit laterals deliberately. An officer certified in a neighboring state is months closer to solo patrol than a new recruit.

Shorten the gap between interest and offer

• Test continuously or monthly instead of once or twice a year. A candidate who has to wait five months for a written test is a candidate another agency hires first.
• Run the background investigation, polygraph and interviews in parallel wherever policy allows, and make the conditional job offer as early as the law lets you, since psychological and medical exams come after it.
• Give every applicant a named contact and a date for the next step.

Keep the officers you have

• Retirements rose 16.4 percent in a year across PERF’s agencies. Know how many of your officers are eligible in the next three years, and recruit against that number now.
• Treat retention bonuses and schedule choice as recruitment spending. Every officer who stays is one fewer vacancy to fill.

The hiring process is the product

Most police hiring processes were built to screen out, which made sense when there were ten applicants per seat. Written exam, physical test, oral board, background, polygraph in many agencies, then the post-offer psychological and medical exams, then the academy. Each step is defensible. Together they can take months, and every week is a chance for the candidate to take another job.

The practical exercise is to map your own process and time it: days from application to test, test to background, background to offer, offer to academy start. Then ask of each gap whether it is waiting time or work time. Most of it is usually waiting — for a scheduled test date, for a board to convene, for a packet to be read. Our guide to police recruitment goes through where applicants drop out at each step and which channels bring them in.

The part the agency controls completely is communication. A candidate who hears nothing for three weeks assumes they were rejected. A short text after each step costs nothing and keeps people in the process; our recruiting text message templates are written for exactly that kind of status update.

Law enforcement recruiting ideas worth testing

These are ideas rather than data — practical things agencies can run inside a quarter and measure against applicants and academy starts.

• Open testing days. Run the written and physical tests on the same Saturday, advertise it two to three weeks ahead to people within commuting distance, and let candidates register from their phone. Our guide on how to promote a hiring event covers the timing.
• Show the schedule and the pay in the first line. Starting pay, academy pay, shift pattern, take-home car policy. Candidates compare these before anything else.
• Recruit from your own civilian staff. Dispatchers, records clerks and community service officers already know the agency and have passed a background.
• Track source to academy start, not to application. A channel that produces 200 applicants and no academy starts is not working.

911 dispatcher recruitment

Dispatch is the shortage inside the shortage. BLS counts 105,600 public safety telecommunicators, projects 4 percent growth to 2035 and about 9,000 openings a year — equal to about 8.5 percent of the workforce annually, higher than for officers. The median wage was $53,040 in May 2025, against $76,210 for patrol officers.

Inside 911 centers the picture is harder. In NENA’s 2024 Pulse of 9-1-1 survey, 82 percent of centers with the means to hire reported difficulty filling vacancies, 75 percent said they lacked the budget to expand their workforce, and the survey reported that 50 percent of trainees fail to complete the probationary period. BLS notes that training may be followed by a probationary period of about a year, and that there is no national standard for training or probation.

Two things follow for anyone recruiting dispatchers:

• Losing trainees is as expensive as not finding them. An honest job preview — a sit-along on a busy shift, audio of real calls, a plain description of mandatory overtime — filters out people who would leave in month four.
• The candidate pool is not the police pool. Dispatch suits people from customer service, call centers, healthcare front desks and retail management: people used to calm under pressure and a headset. Ads aimed at “public safety careers” miss most of them.

Recruiting officers and dispatchers with Facebook and Instagram job ads

Most of the people an agency needs are not searching police job boards. They are working somewhere else in the county and have not thought about the job, or they thought about it years ago and assumed the door had closed. Social job ads reach them by location rather than by search, which is what a local agency needs: the ad appears to adults within commuting distance whether or not they were looking.

What the ad says matters more than where it runs. Lead with starting pay, paid academy, schedule and the fact that no experience is required, if that is true. Use a real officer or dispatcher from your agency. Name the next testing date. Our guide to social media job advertising covers the mechanics.

The application should be a short form, not the full packet. In Boostpoint’s 2026 Social Job Advertising Benchmark of 891 campaigns, the median campaign cost $13.88 per applicant, and what happens after the click — how many people who click through finish the application — explained 70 percent of the difference in cost between campaigns. Ask for name, phone, and the handful of legal disqualifiers; collect the long personal history once the candidate is committed. Then call within a day.

The same approach works for the jail and the fire department. See our pages on the correctional officer shortage and on volunteer firefighter recruitment.

What this page cannot do

It cannot tell you how short your agency is. PERF’s survey covers 197 agencies, weighted toward large ones: large agencies accounted for about 92 percent of the officers surveyed. National BLS figures describe the country. Your shortage depends on your pay against the next county, your testing calendar, and how many of your officers can retire next year. What the data does establish is the shape: hiring is up, staffing is not yet back to 2020, and retirements are the variable to watch.

Related: 911 Dispatcher Interview Questions, Firefighter Shortage.

Frequently asked questions