Arlington’s commonwealth attorney seeking higher pay for prosecutors this budget season, pointing to increased salaries for police officers and potentially better compensation in surrounding localities.
The proposed fiscal year 2027 budget calls for increasing funding for the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office by roughly 3%: from about $7.7 million to $7.9 million. But Commonwealth’s Attorney Parisa Dehghani-Tafti told the Arlington County Board on Tuesday that prosecutors’ starting salary of $82,000 should be higher.
She noted, for instance, that assistant prosecutors are tasked with training new police recruits on the legal aspect of their jobs. Starting pay at the Arlington County Police Department is set to increase in July to $90,000, the highest in the D.C. area.
“We have attorneys who have gotten their bachelor’s degrees, gotten their law degrees, passed the bar, and consistently work well over 40 hours a week … and yet they’re being paid less than the officers that they’re training,” Dehghani-Tafti said.
She also said there can be discrepancies between pay for Arlington prosecutors and those in other jurisdictions. At least for some positions, publicly available data suggests that pay is comparable, even though the cost of living in Arlington is higher.
In Fairfax County, the job of “Assistant Commonwealth Attorney II,” which is one rank higher than the entry-level role, has a starting pay of $83,000. A nearly-identical starting rate is also in place for entry-level prosecutors in Prince William County.
Dehghani-Tafti asserted that prosecutors can make better pay elsewhere.
“Any attorney could walk out of our office today, and walk into another prosecutor’s office in the area and make $10,000 more than they’re making — and be able to afford to live in the community that they serve,” she said.
All things considered, Dehghani-Tafti said that the current pay structure has led to retention and morale issues.
“We have done criminal justice on the cheap in Virginia, and it really shows,” she said. “And as things get harder, the cracks become wider and more problematic.”
Despite compensation concerns, Dehghani-Tafti told the board that the Office of the Commonwealth’s Attorney has seen growing success in securing convictions since she took office in 2020.
Between 2020 and 2025, prosecutors have secured guilty convictions in approximately 77% of cases — up from the 64% conviction rate between 2015 and 2019.
“When we divert cases where the victims want something other than trial and other than punishment … we’re taking better cases to trial, and [we] can resource those trials better because of plea offers and because of our diversion programs,” Dehghani-Tafti said.
County Board members said little of substance about the pay issue, although Board member J.D. Spain, Sr. suggested that greater investment in the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office, and some diversion programs in particular, could pay off.
