The NYPD is losing sergeants in droves as New York City leaders scale back the allure of achieving the rank for police officers, who can make more in annual salary due to a system that allows experienced members of the rank-and-file to make more than freshly promoted supervisors.

Under an expired contract, pay for sergeants starts at $98,000 and is capped at $118,000 after roughly five years, according to the NYPD’s Sergeants Benevolent Association (SBA). Patrol officers top out at $115,000 – meaning hundreds of sergeants make less than thousands of rank-and-file cops who have reached top pay for their position.

“We’re going to have guys potentially in the next year, year and a half that we’ll be making upwards of anywhere between 9 to $15,000 less than a police officer,” said Vincent Vallelong, the president of the SBA. “So you’re going to take a rank with more responsibility, you took a test, three tests, and at the end of the day, you’re losing money.”

Adams, a former NYPD captain himself, previously said he would reach a new contract agreement. His office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital.

Migrants are seen sleeping outside the Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown Manhattan on July 31, 2023. (Luiz C. Ribeiro/New York Daily News/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)

“The mayor was a sergeant at one point in time. He had to be in order to get to the point where he’s at,” Vallelong said. “And you would think that he would understand this more than anybody else, because I guarantee you that if push came to shove, he’s not taking this rank unless he’s getting compensated the right way.”

Departments around the country are struggling with recruitment and retention, making experienced NYPD members attractive to smaller departments where the cost of living is lower, while those departments also increasingly appeal to cops fed up with life in the Big Apple.

Migrants arrive at the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan, New York, on July 25, 2023. (Julia Bonavita/Fox News Digital)

As a result, according to the SBA, NYPD members now face an increased workload while they have less experience overall.

“The mayor was just up in Albany asking for more money for migrants,” Vallelong said. “I know he’s had meetings with the president … maybe he should ask the president to step in like Clinton did back in those years and pass a bill in order to further law enforcement and recruit people and make it more of a respectable job again.”

“We have already spent over $7 billion on this crisis alone, and the previous administration committed only $237 million in funding to help house the migrants in our care and for future services,” a City Hall spokesperson told Fox News Monday. “We have continued to receive previously allocated reimbursements through the past week. We will discuss this matter directly with federal officials.”

Fox News’ Grace Taggart and Max Bacall contributed to this report.