US Federal Employee Salaries (2012)

https://bits.enigma.io/s/t/e15d88f664c0d70d578452b8054b145a

by merinid • 13 years ago

67 127 13 years ago

bits.enigma.io

twoodfin• 13 years ago

Maybe I'm missing something, but is there any way to sort or filter this data?

petsounds5• 13 years ago

soon, but not yet... this just went live last night :)

clarification edit: this is the end result of a new feature that allows enigma users to publicly share a frozen table state (up to 10 pages), which takes into place the current filter/sort state

jessepollak• 13 years ago

This is really awesome. The UI/UX feels a little unapproachable and the feature set seems lacking (what do I do when I get to that page) , but I'm sure it's infinitely better than the alternative.

One small thing that's nice is the column summaries: http://cl.ly/image/2D1S2h0o0B09.

angersock• 13 years ago

Um....

I know it's probably your core business and all, but from a civic standpoint, would you mind posting the raw data so we can play with it?

EDIT:

Thanks folks!

petsounds5• 13 years ago

sure! we actually posted a link to the raw CSV before we pushed this in the beginning of the shutdown: https://twitter.com/enigma_io/status/385166410063691776

macNchz• 13 years ago

Very cool, thanks! Already having some fun:

Location with highest average salary among stations with >25 federal employees:

Islip, NY - 496 employees

$43,162 min

$140,781 avg

$179,700 max

asveikau2• 13 years ago

Maybe I've lost something in all the details, how is this list compiled?

I was born in DC and grew up in the area, as such I know a lot of current federal employees who should be on a 2012 list. I grepped for a handful of names of folks I know personally and so far found only one. (For privacy reasons I will not share the names of non-matches here.)

Update: Ok, I've found two now. Still many more non-matches than matches.

merinid• 13 years ago

Totally agreed. There is an application for access for civic projects: http://dev.enigma.io/

yogo2• 13 years ago

Even with a ~40K standard dev I'd say that's a well paid lot.

genericresponse• 13 years ago

You have to remember that most actual employees are white-collar types. Almost anything commoditizable or blue-collar gets sent to contractors.

Also, let's not forget the cost of living in DC.

phaus9• 13 years ago

The percentage of contractors might be somewhat higher, but there are tons of blue-collar federal positions.

maaku5• 13 years ago

Most federal employees aren't in DC.

yogo2• 13 years ago

I thought this was for all federal employees. I couldn't see all of the data due to some 10 page limit error that kept being displayed.

incision• 13 years ago

Also, let's not forget the cost of living in DC.

For the folks misunderstanding that comment:

The link goes straight to at least ten pages of positions with USDA which is located in Beltsville, about 10 miles outside of DC. Bethesda and Rockville, both of which are in the top five, are other also DC suburbs. At a glance there are 300K+ positions in the DMV area, a significant percentage of the 1.3M listed.

therobot242• 13 years ago

wow a librarian at a GS14 level:

[name removed] DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH SERVICE LIBRARIAN Maryland Prince George's County BELTSVILLE GS 14 119238

I know the GS schedule is based on how long you work as opposed to how well you work, but i didn't think that non-STEM or non-Management roles made above GS11 or 12.

phaus9• 13 years ago

GS isn't based entirely on how long you work. Most positions have a cap. There are also plenty of places that generally don't promote people because the management sucks or they don't have funding. There are also ways to prevent substandard employees from getting promoted.

Perhaps the term librarian means something other than what we think it does, like the librarian of congress. Perhaps its a supervisor at an enormous library. I really hope we aren't paying 90k+ for someone to check out books about farming.

fiatmoney• 13 years ago

I would assume they help keep track of / index the massive amount of government-sponsored agricultural research & data the DoA has generated. "[The Agricultural Research Service] has more than 2,200 permanent scientists working on approximately 1,100 research projects at more than 100 locations", to say nothing of historical data.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_Research_Service

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Agricultural_Library

Jtsummers9• 13 years ago

Keep in mind, it's also not uncommon for those in charge of others to have the same title. That is, in an engineering office the one in charge of a group of 1k engineers is likely an engineer as well, so they'd be a GS-14 or GS-15 electrical engineer. So the person who rose through the ranks of librarians from the lowest level to being in charge of a group of librarians would similarly be a GS-13 or GS-14 librarian.

Jtsummers9• 13 years ago

There are two components to GS, grade and step. Step is based on time, grade is based on position. It's also possible that this person came out as a GS-14 rather than a lower GS-12 or GS-13 due to the attempt at merit based pay (NSPS) that was canceled 3 (4?) years back. Their pay may have been improved via merit increases under NSPS and GS-14 might have been the closest equivalent to their pay or they could have been miscoded as a GS-14 equivalent and it wasn't corrected. Most of these were left as-is rather than fighting to "demote" them to avoid the hassle. Especially since most of them would be retiring within 5 years or so, or would have been promoted to that same level in the near future. Rather than demote them they just won't get the promotion just a lateral move.

GS grades tend to correspond to scope of work, degree of education required and scope of responsibilities. If the work doesn't require a college degree, don't expect anything above GS-9, and probably no better than GS-7. If it's "business ops" that requires a degree but has limited responsibilities you might be a GS-11, engineers are (after their "apprenticeship" period) between GS-11 and GS-13 (essentially, education + depth of knowledge, most GS-13 engineers will be SMEs, subject matter experts). Supervisors will typically be one grade above those they supervise, maybe on par with SMEs, with a typical minimum grade of GS-11. So a supervisor in charge of 40 engineers might be a GS-13, their boss would be a GS-14 and that persons boss a GS-15.

dnautics• 13 years ago

"step" is determined by how long you work, GS number is determined by the job description.

rayiner2• 13 years ago

Unless you're talking about a public library catering to homeless people and children, a "librarian" is typically an educated professional, usually with an advanced degree, who has enough subject matter expertise to efficiently help researchers find relevant materials.

aestra3• 13 years ago

What an ignorant thing to say. Public libraries do more than cater to homeless people and children.

They also employee the advanced degree educated professional librarians you are talking about too.

meepmorp• 13 years ago

Catering to homeless people and children? Seriously?

therobot242• 13 years ago

interestingly enough i know a few people with masters in library science - though, they studied how to organize and present information as opposed to holding a subject matter expertise (in this case agriculture)

acdha5• 13 years ago

I think you're making a mistake in assuming librarians aren't comparable to STEM work. That's a reasonable position for someone with a masters degree who's studied a lot of information theory, subject area expertise, and in many cases non-trivial technical skills to help process, remediate, etc. data on a large scale.

At a research library – and if, as it appears, this is http://www.nal.usda.gov/ it's one of a small number of major national libraries – it's common for librarians to provide expert advice. It's not “Get me [ISBN]” so much as “I'm looking for information on a topic. Can you find good sources?”

Dirlewanger• 13 years ago

Great UI, love it. Didn't realize how many cushy jobs the government has...damn. Now I know why my parents kept telling me to look in the public sector first and foremost.

eli3• 13 years ago

Not a very cushy job this month...

robmcm• 13 years ago

Or very cushy, (if you don't mind not getting paid).

phaus9• 13 years ago

Most of the people who are making 100-200k would make at the very least double that if they were in the private sector. A GS-15 is equivalent to a Brigadier General(Who would be in charge of thousands of people). Now, keep in mind that some technology positions have inflated GS ranks because it was the only way they could get the salaries high enough to attract talent. Security analysts and programmers don't come cheap.

Working for the government can be great, depending on who you work for and whether or not it fits your personality, but don't be deluded into thinking that the majority of government employees have cushy, high paying jobs.

Note: Politicians and Senior Executive Service employees are a different story, many of them are overpaid and ineffective at their jobs.

Jtsummers9• 13 years ago

Paywise they're peers to Colonels and Brigadier Generals, position scope tends towards being equivalent to Colonel (AF, can't speak to other services or departments), with SES employees being the civil service peers to General officers.

Shivetya2• 13 years ago

also include in your exception list, political appointees. I haven't scanned the whole list so I am wondering if the members of the Whitehouse staff, Congress, and similar, are available? The Whitehouse has nearly 500 listed on their site.

The sheer number of government employees is amazing especially when you consider you have to add on top of these numbers those at state, city, and local, levels.

dj_axl• 13 years ago

Most of the people who are making 100-200k would make at the very least double that if they were in the private sector.

The base salary would double. However they'd be left without a pension, and other benefits though I think the pension is easily the largest monetary value.

chernevik2• 13 years ago

The government has significantly _lower_ turnover than the private sector, which isn't what microeconomics says we would see if the workers could make that much more by leaving. It's more consistent with the suggestion that the workers would make considerably less if they left.

So:

1. Microeconomics is seriously, perhaps completely, wrong; or, 2. Federal employees are much more motivated by non-financial rewards, such as the satisfaction of public service, than the rest of us, and are, therefore, better people than the rest of us; or, 3. They couldn't make more in the private sector, and would probably make less.

Take your pick.

kalleboo2• 13 years ago

You could probably make some amazing visualizations of this data.

In Sweden, all the tax records are public information. You can literally look up how much your neighbor makes in a year. So each year after tax season, the tabloids all print up huge lists of "the richest people in YOUR neighborhood!". I've always been disappointed that with all this data, they've never gone beyond that and visualized the data geographically.

csmatt• 13 years ago

I'm not judging one way or another, but is privacy not something the Swedish people are interested in?

zachsnow• 13 years ago

If you were Swedish you might not consider it private information. Being from the US I do, but I don't consider my age private. It's difficult to say where a culture should draw the line, in an objective way.

kalleboo2• 13 years ago

On the whole, I'd say privacy is valued similar. It's just a small quirk. Same how Americans tolerate banks having a secret-sauce shared credit validation system with god knows what information they sell back and forth.

umsm• 13 years ago

You can use a house or lifestyle metric to determine who is richer or poorer. A house or your lifestyle is about as public as it gets.

MaysonL• 13 years ago

Given that the government already knows, and either your employer or your accountant knows, and your bank has a pretty good idea, why do you think your income is to any meaningful extent still private?

udit99• 13 years ago

I created a quick and dirty app to visualize the data set they're using:

http://federal-salaries.herokuapp.com/

eli3• 13 years ago

This data has obviously been public for a while. A site with Senate/House staff salaries makes the rounds every summer when a new round of Hill interns realize they can look up how much their friends and bosses make.

petsounds5• 13 years ago

for anyone who's interested, i generated a link to this sorted by the base salary (descending): https://bits.enigma.io/s/t/8b6aa881e02d8c2b851a3d5140c263f4

and here's a link to a full export (csv): https://s3.amazonaws.com/enigma-data-export/shutdown/enigma-...

maaku5• 13 years ago

Wow, I should have gone into medicine.

kdot• 13 years ago

Where is the president and his aids?

nzealand• 13 years ago

This does not include federal court employees (judges, attorneys...)

fpp2• 13 years ago

Similar data, but still mostly limited to higher pay levels and by government department is available for the UK ( see for example: http://data.gov.uk/dataset/staff-organograms-and-pay-departm... )

a side note: It is generally accepted that the US government pays the highest salaries compared to other government agencies worldwide. This is the reason why the U.N. uses the US government scales and pays as their base (highest salaries of all member states) - of course before they put their "gravy" on it and more than double it.

msh3453• 13 years ago

More importantly, UN salaries are exempt from income tax: https://careers.un.org/lbw/home.aspx?viewtype=SAL

fpp2• 13 years ago

yes, that's on top of the so called post adjustment that for e.g. Geneva (last time I looked) was around 96% (base salary + post adjustment = net salary (+ normal tax rate) -> gross salary in the private sector (30 working days holidays p.a., up to 70% pension levels (17years contribution) with 5 years+ contributions getting you a pension, for senior staff add no VAT, 50% lower petrol prices, real tax & duty free shopping everyday - about half or less your airport shop, etc etc etc)

...and as salaries are normally paid besides tax free also tax equalized (the US is demanding income taxes from all citizens wherever they live including UN staff - the UN covers these taxes for US citizens and a handful other countries) the US pays itself back (via income tax) a nice discount of certainly 10% of its contributions to the UN.

jonnathanson• 13 years ago

My understanding is that US government salaries are high because the US private sector pays so well for comparable positions. The US is in the peculiar business of competing with itself, in a sense, or at least with its own economic model.

Private vs. public isn't such a teeth-gnashing, nail-biting dilemma for many other countries, who generally seem to do a better job of mentally separating the two sectors. The general agreement in other countries is that public = stable job, lower pay, higher "public service" calling; private = higher salary, less stability, etc.

Of course, this isn't taking into account countries like China -- where a government position is the best route into cushy, lucrative gigs in the private sector, and in fact, that's often the entire point. (To some degree, this is also the case in the US, at least at the higher levels of public service.) But I digress.

RougeFemme5• 13 years ago

I think the same public/private comparisons for salary, stability, etc. apply in the U.S., at least for some job categories. It's just that, as you said, the private sector pays so well for comparable positions. Salary-wise, I think less skilled position do better with government, but the higher-skilled positions do better in the private sector. If you see a government engineer/scientist/mathematician working alongside a contractor in the same role, the government employee almost always makes less.

everettForth• 13 years ago

"Average 78,673.52 Stand. Deviation 39,191.8525 Max 398,322.00 Min 0.00 Variance 1,536,001,304.3535"

I don't think variance is being calculated correctly

tgeo• 13 years ago

It is actually correct. Variance is standard deviation squared.

11001• 13 years ago

It is actually correct. Variance is measured in "squared dollars", so it's not very meaningful in terms of interpretation.

Shivetya2• 13 years ago

a fun site to play with is at http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/

runamok• 13 years ago

It would be really interesting to compare this to private sector jobs (where applicable) taking into consideration pension, benefits, etc.

acdha5• 13 years ago

The confound is that senior federal positions tend to be skewed more towards mid-to-late career due to the push over the last decade or two to hire contractors instead of staff. I don't believe there's any public information available which would help you distinguish that.

mrcactu5• 13 years ago

it doesn't include bonuses

petsounds5• 13 years ago

check out the "award bonus" column :)

coldcode• 13 years ago

OK how do you do anything other that scroll the list?

avty• 13 years ago

As we are about to enter a period of hyperinflation, salary is about to sky rocket, led by government employees.

msh3453• 13 years ago

Here are some general stats from OPM on federal employees: http://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/data-analysis-docum...

US Federal Employee Salaries (2012)

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