What does the Edmonton Police Service actually cost?
$475M net (2026 approved) · $560M gross (2024) · plus ~$56–60M/yr in external inflows that never touch the tax levy.
EPS has no single budget number. It depends on framing, and a whole layer of spending is engineered to stay off the ledger. What follows reconstructs the visible budget, the black box beneath it, and the military comparison that lands once you total it up, every figure traced to a filed source.
Open the black box Start with the visible budget See the sources
Four ways to read the file
The visible budget — a decade of published EPS budgets, the 15.4%-of-city fact, and the automatic funding formula that grows the number every year without a vote.
The black box — the core reconstruction. Overtime overruns, ~$50M/yr in provincial grants, the photo-radar reserve, a surveillance-tech capital floor, undisclosed gear, settlements pooled city-wide, and ALERT/federal money that bypasses the EPS ledger entirely.
The military contrast — that budget runs bigger than the entire military of a long list of sovereign nations, several of them larger than Edmonton. Per resident, Edmonton spends more on police than China, Brazil, Mexico, India, or Indonesia spends per citizen on its military.
The equipment dossier — one page per item, tagged confirmed or rumored, with a source clipping behind each entry.
How to read the tags
Every equipment claim carries a status tag so the record stays honest under a hostile reader. confirmed is EPS-admitted, council-documented, or hard reporting. rumored is alleged or inferred with no receipt. See the methodology for how the estimates were built and the tag index to filter by status.
An independent public-interest reconstruction · figures in CAD.