How many federal employees are there?

There is no single federal employee count

Ask how many people work for the federal government and you will get several answers, all of them correct. The disagreement is not a data problem. It is that “federal employee” describes at least four different populations, and the two official statistical series were each built to count a different one.

The Office of Management and Budget publishes staffing once a year, in the historical tables that accompany the President’s Budget. It counts executive-branch civilian full-time equivalents. An FTE is 2,080 paid hours, so two people working half-time count as one — which means the figure is a measure of work-years funded rather than of people employed. It excludes the Postal Service, which funds itself; the uniformed military; and the legislative and judicial branches, which are not part of the executive branch at all. In FY 2025 that number was 2,278,000.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes a different figure every month, from its survey of employer payrolls. It counts filled jobs during the pay period that includes the 12th of the month. It does include the Postal Service and it still excludes the military, and because it is a headcount rather than a work-year count, a part-time employee counts once. In August 2026 it stood at 2,674,000, a figure BLS still marks preliminary.

The federal workforce has barely grown. Its shape has changed completely

This is the finding that surprises almost everyone. In FY 1981 the executive branch employed 2.11 million civilian full-time equivalents. In FY 2025, 44 years later, it employed 2.28 million — a change of +8.0%, or 0.18% a year. Over the same period federal spending and the population both grew by far more.

The line has not been flat, though. It fell through the 1990s to a low of 1.74 million in FY 2001, the smallest executive branch in the period this table covers, then climbed back. Its high point was 2.29 million in FY 2024.

What the chart shows is a swap. Defence civilian staffing fell from 947,000 to 775,000, and its share of the executive branch went from 44.9% to 34.0%. Everything else grew into the space that left.

The single largest change is the Department of Veterans Affairs, which more than doubled — from 214,000 to 452,000, or +111.2%. The VA has gone from 10.1% of the executive branch to 19.8% of it. That is not bureaucracy: the VA runs the largest integrated health system in the country, and most of those employees are clinical staff in hospitals and clinics.

The second is the Department of Homeland Security, which did not exist before 2003. It was assembled from 22 agencies that already existed — customs, immigration, the Coast Guard, the Secret Service, FEMA, airport screening — so its appearance in this table is partly a reorganisation rather than pure growth. But only partly: the column stood at 37,000 in 1981 and 219,000 in 2025, and airport screening alone accounts for tens of thousands of posts that did not exist in any agency before 2001.

Federal employees by department

These are the department groups OMB itself reports. Two of them need reading carefully. “HHS, Education and Social Security” is a single column in the source and cannot be split — if you need one of those three on its own, this table cannot give it to you. “All other” is a residual, not an organisation: it holds everything from NASA to the Small Business Administration, which is why it is large and why its movements are hard to interpret.

5 of these 10 groups are larger than they were in 1981 and 5 are smaller. The departments that shrank are the ones that were largest to begin with, which is why the total has hardly moved while almost every individual line has.

Federal employees by state

Where those jobs actually are is a separate question, and it needs the other source. OMB does not publish staffing geographically; BLS does, estimating federal employment in every state every month. The figures below are for July 2026, the most recent month for which all 51 jurisdictions have been estimated.

The District of Columbia is the entry that does not behave like the others. Its 164,900 federal jobs put it 4th on this list — ahead of 47 of the 50 states, in a jurisdiction smaller than any of them. Virginia and Maryland, the other two halves of the Washington commuter belt, sit on either side of it in the ranking, so three of the five largest concentrations of federal employment in the country are within driving distance of one another.

Federal employment fell in every state over the past year

Comparing July 2026 against the same month a year earlier — the same month, because state figures are not seasonally adjusted and comparing across months would mix a seasonal pattern into the trend — federal employment was lower in all 51 jurisdictions. Not lower on average, and not lower in most: lower in every one.

Nationally the same comparison — July 2026 against July 2025, so that it is genuinely the same months — runs from 2.94 million to 2.68 million, a fall of −8.7%. The declines are steepest in exactly the places with the most federal work to lose: the capital region leads, and the states with the fewest federal jobs moved least.

What these numbers do not tell you

A headcount is not a measure of how much government there is. It says nothing about what those employees do, whether the work needs doing, or how much of the federal government’s actual activity happens through people it does not employ. Most federal spending is not payroll at all: it is transfer payments and grants that move through very small numbers of staff, which is why the departments that spend the most are not the departments that employ the most.

That mismatch is the single most useful thing to take from this page. The spending side is ranked almost entirely differently from the staffing side, and an agency’s budget tells you close to nothing about its size as an employer.

Common questions