How many civilian employees does the U.S. federal government have?

How to get close to this number

Scale from the workforce. A country with a labour force in the hundreds of millions has a national civil service that is a small percentage of it — most public employment sits at state and local level, in schools, police and hospitals. Applying a low single-digit share of public employment to the national workforce lands you in the low millions.

The recent history is what trips people up. Anyone whose impression of the federal workforce dates from a couple of years ago will guess too high, because the largest agencies lost more than eleven percent of their staff in about a year. Yet spending did not fall in step: most federal money flows out as transfers to individuals and payments to contractors rather than as salaries. A budget figure tells you almost nothing about an employee count, and the reverse holds too.

Definitions do heavy work here. The number excludes active-duty military and the postal service, both of which are enormous, leaves out the intelligence agencies, and excludes contractors entirely — and contractor headcount is not systematically published. It is also a monthly count that moves as people leave and are hired. Any statistic about the size of a government depends more on its boundary than on its contents.