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FederalPay Employees Dataset - FederalPay.org


Federal employee information is public record, but until now it has been extremely difficult to access and analyze government employee and pay information. To enable greater government transparency, FederalPay.org has provided a series of tools to interact with a searchable database of Federal civilian employees of the United States Government.

You can now use our Federal Employee Lookup tool to find information on public servants, as well as access a wide variety of statistics and information on the Federal government’s payroll expenditures.

This article serves as an introduction to the FederalPay Employees Dataset, and will answer questions regarding the tools and data available, data sources and limitations, privacy concerns, and more.

Using the FederalPay Employees Dataset

Federal Salary Data Analysis Tools

The federal employee dataset is a fascinating resource that allows an unprecedented level of insight into government compensation and how it varies across agencies and occupations. FederalPay has aggregated this data and broken it down into a variety of views to build a powerful window of transparency into the inner workings of the Federal government.

Some examples questions you can answer with this dataset include:

Thousands of interesting trends can be uncovered using this dataset, making it an essential tool for government watchdogs as well as anyone interested in how their taxes are being spent.

Additionally, this tool can also be highly valuable for current and prospective federal employees. If you are looking to get a job in the federal government you may wonder “which is the highest paying agencies?” Previously you would have no way to know — but now you can use our powerful Agency Salary Comparison Tool to find out the data you need to advance your Federal career.

For example, if you are a Law Enforcement Officer looking to apply for a federal job, you might wonder if you should apply to the U.S. Marshals Service, the U.S. Secret Service, Alcohol Tobacco Firearms & Explosives (ATFE), or the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). Now you can use the salary comparison graph to see exactly how much each agency pays:

Employee Search Example

Compare salaries between the ATFE, Marshals Service, Drug Enforcement Agency, and the Secret Service.

Based on the salary comparison graph above, you can clearly see that Alcohol Tobacco Firearms & Explosives (ATF) pays the most — on average $98,897.05 per year. This is almost $3,000/yr more than the U.S. Secret Service. If you are already a federal employee or considering becoming one, you can use information from these tools to make more informed career choices.


Federal Employee Lookup Tool

Using the employee lookup tool pictured below, you can now search 1.3 million federal employee records instantly. Our employee lookup tool is free to the public, and covers employee records from 2004 through the most recent data year available (generally the previous calendar year). We will continue to publish new records as we receive them.

Employee Search Example

Federal Employee Lookup Tool. Search by a specific department, agency, state, year, or name.

The employee lookup tool allows you to search for individual Government employees, and covers millions of Federal civilian employees across hundreds of government agencies available through open government laws. The information available through this tool is discussed in more detail below.

Data Sources and Exceptions

Where does this data come from?

The data that powers our Federal employee search, salary comparison tool, and the rest of FederalPay’s government pay analytics comes from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) , the Enterprise Human Resources Integration (EHRI) dataset, the USPS , and other agency’s central employee databases.


What information about Federal employees is public information?

Under open government laws specified in 5 U.S.C. § 552, the names, titles, and salaries of all civilian government employees are considered public information. However, employee demographics such as race and sex, and information on employee performance or disciplinary actions, are not publicly available.

Data withheld under exceptions to these laws includes the identity and location of employees in sensitive occupations and security agencies (FBI, Secret Service, DEA, ATFE), the Internal Revenue Service, and the U.S. Mint, which are restricted for national security reasons.


FederalPay’s policy on publishing Federal employee salaries

In addition to names and occupations, salary information of individual government employees is considered public information.

In the interest of balancing government transparency with employee privacy, FederalPay’s policy is to publicly include on employee profile pages the salaries of all Federal employees who earn over $100,000 per year, or who are in the highest paid 10% in their respective agencies.

The salary data of Federal employees in the database who do not exceed these criteria can be requested, subject to certain usage limitations, on the respective employee profile page.


Removal or modification of Federal employee information

We are committed to publishing all Federal employee data as-is and unmodified, as received from the OPM. FederalPay is therefore unable to modify or remove the information of any individual federal employee from this dataset.


Accuracy and completeness of information in the FederalPay Employees Dataset

We publish federal salary information exactly as it is provided by the OPM, so it is important to understand the limitations and omissions that may occur in summarized data or individual employees’ information. Here are some of the most common data issues to consider:

  • Salary / Compensation – The Office of Personnel Management reports the adjusted base salary of all employees covered by this dataset, as well as any award amounts paid to each employee. Performance-rating based awards are not included, and some agency-specific incentive pay may also not be listed. All salaries listed are annualized – in some cases, employees may have worked part-time or only for a portion of the year, so the salary amount listed would not reflect their take-home pay in these scenarios. Benefits are also not included in salary calculations.
  • Job Title / Occupation – The OPM has a standard list of several hundred Job Series, which they must use to classify hundreds of thousands of Federal employees with various duties and responsibilities. Due to this limitation, the job series under which an employee is listed may be much broader than their actual job title. For example, the job series Miscellaneous Administration and Program — the second-most common in the Federal government — covers a wide variety of administrative, clerical and managerial employees, from low level assistants all the way up to Departmental heads.
  • Years Covered – The FederalPay Employees Dataset is updated at the end of each year, and contains data for all years since 2004. Data from prior to 2004 is not currently available in our dataset, though it may be added in the future.

We appreciate your input or suggestions in making the FederalPay Employees Dataset better and more useful for Federal employees and the civilians and taxpayers of the United States alike. Please feel free to contact us with any suggestions or comments about these tools.

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Topics: FWSGS PayJobsLEOSES
** This Document Provided By www.FederalPay.org - The Civil Employee's Resource **
Source: www.federalpay.org/articles/employee-lookup