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# Baywatch Pay: What LA County's Top Lifeguards Actually Earn
November 09 2026
Written by Jose E. Navarro, MBA.
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THE NAVARRO REPORT - Most Angelenos picture a lifeguard as a seasonal worker in a red swimsuit, scanning the surf for a summer wage. For a substantial number of Los Angeles County lifeguards, the paycheck looks nothing like that. In 2024, 134 of them earned at least $200,000 in total compensation, and the group's combined package reached $70.8 million, according to the watchdog OpenTheBooks.
A word on what that number means. It counts base pay, overtime, leave payouts, health insurance, pension contributions and other benefits. It covers only the 134 highest-paid lifeguards out of more than 1,500 on county payrolls, not the whole workforce. Even so, the group's average works out to roughly $528,000 each, my own arithmetic from the published totals, and the average overstates a typical package, because a few very large ones pull it up.
It also helps to know that "lifeguard" covers two very different jobs. Ocean lifeguards, including the chief and captains, work for the county Fire Department and protect the beaches. Pool and lake lifeguards work for the Parks and Recreation Department, and their pay and pension benefits are set separately. Nearly all of the big packages in this story belong to the first group.
Start at the top. Lifeguard Services Chief Fernando Boiteux received $523,351 in 2024 in base pay, other pay and benefits, according to OpenTheBooks. He collected no overtime. His benefits alone came to about $192,000, including a $100,000 pension contribution from the county, which was $25,000 more than anyone else received. Thirty-four lifeguards had packages of $300,000 or more.
Overtime tells a second story. Forty-five lifeguards collected between $50,000 and $171,000 in overtime alone in 2024. The largest overtime earner, a lifeguard services captain, took in $171,000 in overtime and $109,999 in benefits, for a total of $468,556. Over five years, the ten lifeguards with the most overtime each received between $345,000 and $702,000, and taxpayers paid those ten a combined $4,782,570 since 2020.
These numbers have grown. When OpenTheBooks looked at 2021, it found 98 lifeguards earning at least $200,000 with benefits. Three years later the count was 134, an increase of 37 percent by my calculation.
Now consider why the retirement side matters. Top lifeguard officials and ocean lifeguards work for the county Fire Department and make up about half of all lifeguards. After 30 years of service, they can retire on between 70 and 81 percent of their pay, depending on their pension tier. The plan lets an employee choose the 12-month window that produces the highest average monthly pay for the final salary calculation. OpenTheBooks estimates that a lifeguard with the chief's base pay, at the conservative 70 percent rate, could collect about $191,849 a year, plus cost-of-living adjustments, for as long as he lives.
Here is the gap in the public record. I could not find a published count of how many retired lifeguards the county supports, or what it pays them each year. Lifeguards sit inside the Fire Department, so their retirees are mixed into the Los Angeles County Employees Retirement Association's data with firefighters. That is the number that would show the full lifetime cost of the pay scale, and nobody has put it in front of the public.
Fairness requires the other side. The work is dangerous. OpenTheBooks itself notes that lifeguards put themselves in harm's way, and it cites the 2024 Medal of Valor given to two ocean lifeguards for a pier jump into heavy surf to rescue a person in crisis. Pay is also uneven: the other half of the workforce, the pool and lake lifeguards at Parks and Recreation, earn far less. The highest-paid of them received $65,000 in total compensation, about 12 percent of the top ocean lifeguard's package. The City of Los Angeles, by contrast, employs its pool and open-water lifeguards part-time, and the highest paid among its 487 active lifeguards made about $35,000 in 2024.
So the question is not whether lifeguards deserve good pay. It is whether residents understand what the county has agreed to pay, and what it will owe for decades after the work ends.
Three steps would answer that. First, the county should publish an annual lifeguard compensation report that separates base pay, overtime and benefits, and shows the share going to the highest-paid tier. Second, LACERA should report how many retired lifeguards it supports and the annual cost, so the pension side is visible beside the payroll side. Third, the Board of Supervisors should publish the actuarial statement that California Government Code section 7507 already requires before a local body authorizes any change to retirement benefits, so residents can see the future cost before the vote.
As a controller, I learned that a payroll number is only the first line of a bill. Pensions, health coverage and cost-of-living adjustments make up the rest, and they arrive years later. Los Angeles County has put a $70.8 million line on the page for 134 lifeguards in a single year. Residents are entitled to see the whole ledger.
Figures are from OpenTheBooks' July 2025 analysis of 2024 county payroll data, and have not been independently verified against county records.
Jose E. Navarro, MBA, is a financial controller and the publisher of The Navarro Report, a public finance and government accountability publication based in San Diego, California.
Source: [OpenTheBooks, Baywatch Pay Watch: Half-million-dollar checks, six-figure overtime for LA lifeguards (July 2, 2025)](https://www.google.com/url?q=https://openthebooks.substack.com/p/baywatch-pay-watch-half-million-dollar&source=gmail&ust=1794282352498000&sa=E)
*(**Jose E. Navarro, MBA**, is a San Diego–based financial controller, public finance analyst and founder of The Navarro Report. With more than 20 years of experience in public finance, nonprofit management and government contract compliance, he writes about government spending, transparency and public accountability. )*
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