Our perception of public employees is frequently distorted by the perception of low pay when compared to other public opportunities. The reality for most government workers is much different. These workers not only earn a higher cash income, but much higher total compensation.
How many workers do you know with both a pension plan, a defined contribution savings plan, good health benefits and with these benefits carried into retirement with a COLA added to pension payments?
Federal civilian workers whose highest level of education was a bachelor’s degree earned 5 percent more, on average, in the federal government than in the private sector
Federal civilian workers with no more than a high school education earned 34 percent more, on average, than similar workers in the private sector.
Average benefits were 52 percent higher for federal employees whose highest level of education was a bachelor’s degree than for similar private-sector employees
Average benefits were 93 percent higher for federal employees with no more than a high school education than for their private-sector counterparts.
For federal employees with doctorates or professional degrees salaries were 23% lower and benefits about the same as the private sector.
Source: CBO. Comparing the Compensation of Federal and Private-Sector Employees, 2011 to 2015
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Tricky, without knowing how exhaustive the study was. The biggest factor is benefits. Pensions and retiree healthcare.But, I believe federal is like state and local government workers. Only about twenty percent are “lifetime” employees (30+ years) and half of employees don’t stay long enough to vest at all. They do have a longer average tenure than private, but not by much.
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Most government employees vest at 3 years. For the vast majority of public employees, state, local and federal, their total rewards, for the work they do, is clearly superior to private sector workers for the same work.
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I couldn’t disagree more. Vesting is five years where I come from (California) and for federal employees. In 2024, median tenure of government employees was 6.2 years. Most government employees are not govt employees, they are private sector workers on one of a series of jobs.
But the most important factor is that the comparison of average, or median, or “vast majority” compensation is misleading.
According to Richard’s source, and the above graph:
“Federal civilian workers with no more than a high school education earned 34 percent more, on average, than similar workers in the private sector. By contrast, federal workers with a professional degree or doctorate earned 24 percent less, on aver age, than their private-sector counterparts.
Overall, the federal government would have reduced its spending on wages by 3 percent if it had decreased the pay of its less educated employees and increased the pay of its more educated employees to match the wages of their private-sector counterparts.”
Is that the way you want to go?
(Rhetorical question)
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It is about the same for many state, county, and city employees. Companies have to control payroll budgets or they may soon have to close their doors. Government offices can operate without many of these concerns as long as they can get increases in their budgets each year, many of the increases are automatic.
Yakov Smirnoff – “What a way to run a country”
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Your stats certainly explain why the government does not run professionally. I would have flipped the degree employees with the non-degreed employee’s compensation. It makes it seem like these college educated people are not smart enough to find a job in the private sector and they setting for government work. I hope that is not true and probably is not fair to say that about those workers but it looks that way.
As far as the high school educated employees, without looking at the job classifications, I do not know if that is a fair assessment. So many people now work for no benefits or part time, that any benefits would double their compensation.
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