Federal Employees Number Statistics in US 2026 | Key Facts

Number of Federal Employees in the US 2026

The number of federal employees in the US in 2026 is a story of historic, rapid contraction — a sharp reversal of a decades-long upward trend. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Employment Situation Summary released February 11, 2026 — the most current data available as of today — there were 2.69 million federal government workers as of January 2026, excluding active military personnel. Of those, 592,800 were U.S. Postal Service employees. Excluding the Postal Service, the total number of federal civilian employees in January 2026 was 2.09 million — a drop of 32,800 from December 2025 alone, and a cumulative decline of 316,900 since January 2025, representing a 13% reduction in the entire federal workforce in just one year. The latest data from OPM’s Federal Workforce Data (FWD) platform, updated through December 2025, counts 2.07 million federal civilian employees across 128 agencies, with an average salary of $116,751. The federal government remains the single largest employer in the United States, but it is now shrinking at a pace unseen in modern American history.

The workforce reduction that drove the federal employee headcount to its lowest level in years was set in motion by Executive Order 14210, issued by the Trump administration in early 2025, directing agencies to “Reform the Federal Workforce to Better Serve Americans.” That order triggered a cascade of actions: a federal hiring freeze (extended through October 15, 2025), a Deferred Resignation Program (DRP) allowing employees to separate with full pay and benefits through September 30, 2025, early retirement incentives, reductions in force (RIFs), and a new OPM rule stripping civil service protections from roughly 50,000 senior career employees whose roles are deemed policy-determining. OPM’s own confirmed data shows the government shed well over 300,000 employees in gross terms across 2025, with a net loss of nearly 220,000 after accounting for new hires. Telework hours dropped 75% between January and October 2025 due to on-site work requirements. The number of federal employees in the US in 2026 now sits at a decade low, according to OPM — and further reductions are expected throughout the year.

Interesting Key Facts About Federal Employees Number in the US 2026

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), Employment Situation Summary — January 2026, released February 11, 2026 (bls.gov/news.release/archives/empsit_02112026.htm); OPM Federal Workforce Data (FWD) platform, December 2025 (data.opm.gov); Federal News Network, “OPM data overhaul reveals deeper federal workforce insights,” January 8, 2026 (federalnewsnetwork.com); Jack Salmon, “Tracking Efforts to Shrink the Size of the Federal Workforce: January 2026 Update,” February 12, 2026 (theunseenandtheunsaid.com); Congressional Budget Office (CBO) compensation analysis cited in OPM datasets (cbo.gov/publication/60235).

The scale of change in the federal workforce in 2026 is difficult to overstate. A net loss of 316,900 workers since January 2025 — 13% of the entire civilian federal workforce in 12 months — is the largest single-year contraction in the size of the federal civilian payroll in modern American records. To put it in perspective: the Clinton administration’s celebrated “Reinventing Government” initiative shrank the workforce by roughly 270,000 workers over his entire two-term, eight-year presidency. The current administration has already exceeded that figure in a single year, and with RIF processes still working through the courts and additional agency-level actions underway, January 2026’s count of 2.09 million excluding USPS is widely expected to fall further as the year progresses. Revisions to December 2025 numbers that accompanied the January BLS release also revealed that what had appeared to be a small increase in December was actually a decrease of 18,300 workers — meaning the downturn has been even steeper than initially reported.

Perhaps just as striking as the raw headcount decline is what the numbers reveal about how the workforce is being reshaped, not just reduced. The average federal salary climbing from approximately $110,000 in March 2025 to $116,751 by December 2025 reflects a clear survivor bias: lower-paid workers accepted the DRP at higher rates, while higher-salaried technical specialists and senior federal employees were more likely to remain. The share of unionized federal workers collapsing from 56% to 38% in a single year is another extraordinary structural shift, reflecting both new OPM bargaining rules and the departure of large numbers of union-represented employees through the DRP. The combined effect means the federal government’s workforce in 2026 is simultaneously smaller, better-paid per employee, and significantly less collectively organized than it was just twelve months ago.

Federal Employees by Major Agency in the US 2026

Source: OPM Federal Workforce Data (FWD) platform, December 2025 snapshot (data.opm.gov/explore-data/analytics/workforce-size-and-composition); OpenFeds analysis of OPM December 2025 data (openfeds.org); Federal News Network, January 8, 2026 (federalnewsnetwork.com).

The distribution of federal employees by agency in December 2025 shows which parts of the government were protected from workforce cuts and which were not. The Department of Veterans Affairs, with 451,100 civilian employees, remains the largest Cabinet-level department — but that is a significant decline from the 482,831 it employed just in September 2024, driven by DRP departures and voluntary separations. Most VA workers serve in the Veterans Health Administration, operating one of the largest integrated healthcare networks in the world. The Defense Department’s civilian branches — the Navy (205,600), Army (198,400), Air Force (156,700), and DoD HQ agencies (146,600) — collectively still employ over 707,300 civilian workers and were largely shielded from severe cuts given their national security missions. The fact that nurses are now the single largest occupational group across the entire federal government, according to OPM’s new FWD platform, reflects the weight of the VA and military healthcare systems in shaping the overall workforce composition.

Among domestic civilian-facing agencies, the reductions have been far sharper. The Department of Health and Human Services dropped to 75,100 employees — down from roughly 80,000 in September 2024 — after RIFs targeted the CDC, FDA, and other HHS subcomponents. Agriculture fell to 72,000 and the Interior to 56,900, reflecting the administration’s goal of reducing regulatory and land-management functions. Meanwhile, several smaller independent agencies experienced disproportionately devastating losses. The General Services Administration lost 33.3% of its entire workforce, the OPM itself shed 39.8% of its staff, and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) — once employing over 10,000 civilian workers — was reduced to just 3,737 employees by December 2025 after the administration moved to dismantle it. These are not minor administrative adjustments; they represent fundamental changes to the operational capacity of major federal functions that will shape the federal workforce landscape throughout 2026 and beyond.

Number of Federal Employees by State in the US 2026

Note: National totals are updated to January 2026 (BLS). State-level OPM breakdowns are available through September 2024 (the most recent confirmed state-level release as of February 2026). State-level data does not yet reflect 2025 reductions, which will appear in future OPM FWD state releases.

Source: U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), FedScope September 2024; USAFacts, “How many people work for the federal government?” updated November 2025 (usafacts.org); Congressional Research Service Report R47716 (congress.gov); New York State Comptroller’s Office (osc.ny.gov); Partnership for Public Service, “Beyond the Capital,” March 2025 (ourpublicservice.org); Pew Research Center, January 2025 (pewresearch.org).

State-level federal employment figures in 2026 reinforce the reality that the federal workforce is genuinely national — and that cuts are rippling outward from Washington into communities in every corner of the country. The popular misconception that federal workers are concentrated around the capital is firmly refuted by the data: while Washington, DC leads in employment density (with approximately 162,000 federal civilian employees representing around 41% of DC’s entire workforce), the state-level leaders are California (150,679), Virginia (147,358), and Maryland (144,497). The DC-Maryland-Virginia corridor combined accounts for roughly 20% of all federal civilian workers, while the other 80% are distributed across the remaining states. Outside the DC region, California, Texas, Florida, and Georgia each host enormous federal workforces primarily serving VA hospitals, military installations, IRS centers, and border security operations — agencies whose workforces have been cut in 2025.

The economic consequences of the 2025–2026 federal workforce reductions are already being measured at the state level. In New York alone, the State Comptroller’s Office documented 3,000 fewer seasonally adjusted federal jobs by July 2025 compared to January 2025 — and the pace of reduction accelerated through December 2025, with further declines expected as the effects of the DRP and RIFs fully hit payrolls at VA medical centers, Social Security offices, and IRS service centers across the state. New York, which ranked 7th nationally in federal civilian employment in 2024 with over 116,000 workers, has seen federal employment fall continuously since its peak of over 147,000 in 2000. Every congressional district in the country has federal employees — making the federal workforce contraction of 2025–2026 a genuinely national economic and public service story, not simply a political event confined to the halls of Washington agencies.

Federal Employees Historical Trend in the US 2026

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), Current Employment Statistics (CES), FRED Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, series CES9091000001, through January 2026 (fred.stlouisfed.org); OPM Federal Workforce Data (FWD), December 2025 (data.opm.gov); OPM press release, July 1, 2025 (opm.gov); USAFacts federal employment tracker (usafacts.org); Pew Research Center, January 2025 (pewresearch.org); Jack Salmon, February 2026 (theunseenandtheunsaid.com).

The historical arc of federal civilian employment makes the 2025–2026 period look like a dramatic cliff’s edge after a long, steady, upward slope. From 1,855,900 workers in November 2000, the federal civilian workforce grew at roughly 1% per year over the following two-plus decades — absorbing the post-9/11 homeland security buildup, the post-2008 stimulus expansion, and the steady growth of VA healthcare for aging veterans — until it reached a post-1994 record high of 2,313,216 employees in September 2024. That upward trend was punctuated briefly by 2013 sequestration cuts and a gentle plateau during the first Trump term, but the underlying direction was always upward. Then came 2025 and the slope inverted sharply: from 2,313,216 in September 2024 to 2,289,472 in March 2025 to roughly 2,070,000 by December 2025 to 2,090,000 in January 2026 — a net loss of more than 220,000 workers in a single year, now officially described by analysts as the largest federal workforce reduction in modern American history.

Understanding where the federal workforce stands in 2026 requires situating it against historical benchmarks. The Clinton administration’s drawdown — often cited as the gold standard for federal workforce reduction — shrank the civilian non-postal workforce to about 1,880,000 by the late 1990s. The current Trump administration has publicly stated that matching Clinton-era lows is an explicit goal, which would require reducing the workforce to fewer than 2.08 million workers by 2028. As of January 2026, at exactly 2.09 million excluding USPS, the workforce has nearly reached that threshold — and with monthly drops of 32,800 in January 2026 alone, the Clinton-era floor is expected to be breached well ahead of schedule. The total number of federal employees in the US in 2026 has already returned to levels not seen since the mid-2010s, with the pace of decline suggesting it could reach levels not seen since the early 2000s before the year is out.

Federal Employee Pay & Compensation Statistics in the US 2026

Source: OPM Federal Workforce Data (FWD) platform, December 2025 (data.opm.gov); OPM data.opm.gov/data/datasets, weighted average salary as of March 2025; Congressional Budget Office (CBO), “Comparing the Compensation of Federal and Private-Sector Employees” (cbo.gov/publication/60235); OpenFeds agency salary data, December 2025 (openfeds.org); Jack Salmon, February 12, 2026 (theunseenandtheunsaid.com).

The federal employee pay landscape in 2026 tells a story of a workforce that is not just shrinking but becoming more expensive per worker even as it contracts. The average federal salary climbed from approximately $110,000 in March 2025 to $116,751 by December 2025 — a 6.1% rise in nine months that cannot be explained by any pay raise (the 2025 raise was only 2%). The real driver is survivor bias: lower-paid workers — entry-level employees, administrative support staff, field workers — accepted the Deferred Resignation Program at disproportionately higher rates, while senior technical specialists, doctors, engineers, and law enforcement professionals were more likely to remain or be actively retained under security and safety exemptions. When benefits are factored in using the CBO’s standard methodology (salary equals roughly 60% of total compensation), the average total cost per federal worker has climbed to approximately $183,000–$194,585 — meaning the 2.09 million remaining civilian workers (excluding USPS) now represent an annual compensation bill of well over $380 billion, not accounting for the Postal Service or uniformed military.

The agency-level variation in average salaries reveals the skills premium embedded in each department’s mission. The Department of Transportation leads at $142,093 average salary, reflecting its concentration of engineers, air traffic controllers, and aviation safety specialists. HHS at $135,367 is pulled up by large numbers of NIH researchers and FDA scientists, even after significant RIF losses. Justice at $122,246 and DHS at $118,849 reflect the elevated pay of federal law enforcement, prosecutors, and border security professionals. At the other end, Agriculture ($90,877) and Treasury ($92,769) have lower averages driven by field inspectors, agricultural loan officers, and IRS customer service representatives — many of whom are among those who have departed in the largest numbers. The across-the-board inflation injected by the 5.2% pay raise of January 2024 — the largest in over 40 years — continues to elevate every base pay level across the federal pay scale, ensuring that even as the number of federal employees falls sharply, the per-employee cost of those who remain will keep rising through 2026 and beyond.

Federal Employees Workforce Composition & Demographics in the US 2026

Source: OPM Federal Workforce Data (FWD), December 2025 (data.opm.gov); Pew Research Center, “What the data says about federal workers,” January 2025 (pewresearch.org); Federal News Network, January 8, 2026 (federalnewsnetwork.com); Partnership for Public Service, “A Profile of the Federal Workforce” (ourpublicservice.org).

The demographic makeup of the federal workforce in 2026 reflects both long-standing structural patterns and some of the most dramatic single-year shifts in the history of federal HR data. Federal employment has historically over-represented Black workers (18.6% of federal employees vs. 12.8% of the national workforce) while under-representing Hispanic/Latino workers (10.5% vs. 18.7% nationally) — patterns rooted in decades of federal equal employment opportunity efforts and the geographic concentration of federal facilities near historically Black communities in cities like Washington DC, Atlanta, and Baltimore. The federal workforce also skews significantly older than the broader U.S. labor market: 28.1% of federal workers are 55 or older, compared to 23.6% nationally, and fewer than 9% are under 30 compared to 22.7% of all American workers. That age skew amplified the impact of the DRP — workers closer to retirement age are statistically far more likely to accept a buyout — meaning the workers most likely to leave in 2025 were precisely the most experienced, longest-tenured members of the federal workforce.

The most structurally significant demographic change in 2026 is the near-collapse of union representation: from 56% of all federal workers covered by collective bargaining as of January 2025, down to just 38% by January 2026 — an 18-percentage-point drop in a single year, one of the largest shifts in public-sector union coverage in modern U.S. history. This reflects Trump administration executive orders stripping bargaining rights from large categories of workers, the OPM rule reclassifying 50,000 senior career employees to at-will status, and the higher rates at which union-represented employees accepted the DRP. OPM’s own new Federal Workforce Data platform — which went live on January 9, 2026, replacing the old FedScope interface — now shows bargaining unit status as a standard data field, making this shift visible in real time for the first time. The federal workforce of early 2026 is simultaneously smaller, higher-paid on average, older, less unionized, and operating at staffing levels in many programs that represent decade-low capacity for public services millions of Americans rely on daily.

Federal Workforce Changes & Reductions in the US 2026

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), Employment Situation Summary — January 2026, released February 11, 2026 (bls.gov/news.release/archives/empsit_02112026.htm); OPM Federal Workforce Data (FWD), December 2025 (data.opm.gov/explore-data/analytics/workforce-changes); OPM press release, July 1, 2025 (opm.gov/news/new-data-shows-trump-administrations-progress); Partnership for Public Service, “New FedScope Data: 2025 Federal Workforce Changes,” July 10, 2025 (ourpublicservice.org); OpenFeds analysis of OPM December 2025 data (openfeds.org); Federal News Network, January 8, 2026 (federalnewsnetwork.com); Jack Salmon, February 12, 2026 (theunseenandtheunsaid.com).

The federal workforce reduction numbers entering 2026 are historic by every measurable standard. The 316,900 net decline in total federal employment from January 2025 to January 2026 not only sets the record for the largest single-year federal workforce contraction in modern history but does so while a congressionally mandated pause on formal reductions-in-force was still in effect through the end of January. That means the 32,800 jobs lost in January 2026 alone were almost entirely voluntary deferred resignations — workers whose separation agreements processed in January after the DRP’s extended deadline — not agency-initiated layoffs. Once that pause expired in February 2026, additional involuntary RIF separations were expected to accelerate the pace of decline further. The revised December 2025 figure, which BLS updated simultaneously with its January 2026 release, revealed that December itself saw a decrease of 18,300 workers — a figure initially reported as a small gain — meaning the downturn has been consistently deeper than headline numbers initially suggested.

The concentration of cuts by agency shows a deliberate restructuring, not a uniform across-the-board reduction. Agencies tied to domestic regulation, diplomacy, scientific research, and civil enforcement bore disproportionately heavy losses. The GSA lost 33.3% of its workforce, the OPM itself lost 39.8%, and USAID was effectively dismantled — reduced to just 3,737 civilian employees from a pre-2025 headcount of over 10,000, with its 3,737 RIF actions representing the second-highest concentration of formal reductions of any agency in the 2020–2025 period. HHS alone accounted for 4,545 RIF actions over that same period, the most of any single department. Meanwhile, agencies with direct national security, law enforcement, and military-support missions were shielded, with immigration enforcement, border security, and defense-adjacent civilian roles either exempted from the hiring freeze or actively staffed up. The federal employment data of 2026 confirms what the individual agency numbers make plain: the U.S. federal government has undergone a deliberate structural realignment that will define the size, shape, and capacity of American public administration for years to come.

Disclaimer: The data reports published on The Global Files are sourced from publicly available materials considered reliable. While efforts are made to ensure accuracy, no guarantees are provided regarding completeness or reliability. The Global Files is not liable for any errors, omissions, or damages resulting from the use of these reports.