Number of Federal Employees by Year Statistics in US 2026 | Key Facts

Federal Employees in the US 2026

The number of federal employees in the United States has never been under more scrutiny than it is right now, heading into 2026. After spending years climbing back toward the 3 million mark — a threshold last crossed in 1994 — the federal civilian workforce reached a peak in October 2024 and has been in rapid, historically unprecedented freefall ever since. According to the most recent official data released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) on February 11, 2026 (USDL-26-0169), federal government employment declined by 34,000 in January 2026 alone, as federal employees who had accepted a Deferred Resignation offer in 2025 formally came off federal payrolls. Since the October 2024 peak, federal employment is down by 327,000 — a drop of 10.9 percent — the single largest and fastest contraction of the federal workforce in the modern era of employment tracking. The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Federal Workforce Data (FWD) platform, updated as of December 2025, shows 2.07 million federal employees across 128 agencies — government-wide staffing at a decade low.

What makes these numbers so consequential is that the federal government is the country’s single largest employer, with workers embedded in every state, territory, and major city across the country. The OPM snapshot from March 31, 2025 — the most detailed agency-level data publicly available — recorded 2,289,472 federal civilian employees, down from 2,313,216 on September 30, 2024, reflecting the early impact of a hiring freeze enacted January 20, 2025, and the wave of involuntary terminations and restructuring that followed. Since January 2025, when accounting for both new hires and departures, there has been a net loss of nearly 220,000 federal employees, and 217,000 federal positions have been restructured — the largest such workforce reduction in modern U.S. history (OPM/OpenFeds, December 2025). Telework hours across agencies fell by 75 percent between January and October 2025 as return-to-office mandates were enforced. Every single executive branch agency recorded a net decrease in staff during fiscal year 2025. This article compiles the most current, fully verified statistics on the number of federal employees by year in the US 2026, drawn exclusively from official U.S. government sources and leading nonpartisan research organizations.

Interesting Key Facts: Number of Federal Employees in the US 2026

Source: U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Federal Workforce Data (FWD) platform, December 2025 (data.opm.gov); OPM FedScope March 2025 data release; OPM Press Release, July 1, 2025; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), Employment Situation — January 2026 (USDL-26-0169), released February 11, 2026; OpenFeds.org, December 2025; Partnership for Public Service, May 2025; Pew Research Center, January 2025; USAFacts, November 2025; Federal News Network, January 8, 2026.

The table above captures the most current, verified snapshot of federal employment in the United States as of today, February 27, 2026, and it presents a picture unlike any in the modern era of workforce data. The two headline figures together — 2.07 million tracked by OPM’s new FWD platform through December 2025 and the BLS confirmation of −327,000 jobs (−10.9%) since the October 2024 peak — confirm that the federal civilian workforce has undergone the largest and fastest restructuring since post-World War II demobilization. Every metric in this table either reflects a record or a near-record: the 70 percent collapse in monthly new federal hiring, the 75 percent drop in federal telework hours, the 100 percent rate at which all executive branch agencies lost net staff in FY 2025, and the union representation share falling from 56 to 38 percent — all of these are developments with no real precedent in modern federal workforce history.

The concentration of the federal workforce in a small number of mega-departments is equally striking. The Department of Defense’s civilian payroll of 772,549, the VA’s 482,831, and DHS’s 227,566 together account for the majority of the non-postal federal workforce, while the Department of Education operates with just 4,245 employees — fewer staff than many medium-sized city governments — despite overseeing tens of billions in annual federal education spending. The 2.07 million figure from OPM’s December 2025 FWD platform — which covers 128 agencies and reflects real-time monthly status data — is the most current federal headcount number available from any official U.S. government source as of the date of publication of this article.

Number of Federal Employees by Year in the US 2026 – Historical Trend (1990–2026)

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), Current Employment Statistics (CES), seasonally adjusted; OPM Federal Workforce Data (FWD), December 2025 (data.opm.gov); USAFacts, November 2025; Pew Research Center, January 2025; BLS Employment Situation — January 2026 (USDL-26-0169), February 11, 2026. Note: OPM figures exclude USPS, most intelligence agencies, and legislative/judicial branches; BLS CES includes USPS.

The year-by-year history of federal employment tells a story shaped as much by world events as by policy decisions. The all-time modern peak of 3.4 million federal civilian employees in May 1990 came at the tail end of Cold War military buildup, followed by a sustained decline through the mid-1990s as defense spending wound down and the Clinton administration’s “Reinventing Government” effort reduced headcounts. The workforce then bottomed out in the 2.7 million range by 2014 — the most recent low before the current contraction — and had spent the following decade slowly climbing back. By March 2024, BLS data put federal employment (excluding USPS) at 2,405,100 — and by October 2024, the total including USPS crossed 3 million for the first time since 1994.

That milestone evaporated within months. Between January and August 2025, the BLS recorded a drop of roughly 97,000 federal jobs. The deeper OPM picture, now visible on the new Federal Workforce Data platform (data.opm.gov, December 2025), shows government-wide staffing at a decade low of approximately 2.07 million employees across the 128 agencies tracked monthly. By January 2026, the BLS’s broader measure — including the Postal Service — confirmed federal employment is 327,000 below its October 2024 peak, representing a 10.9 percent reduction in just over 15 months. The 2020 census spike, when temporary hiring pushed the federal rolls from 2.9 million in January to 3.2 million by August before returning to baseline by December, serves as a useful reminder of how quickly headcounts can shift — but nothing in recent decades compares to the scale or speed of the current contraction.

Federal Employees by Agency in the US 2026 – Top Departments by Headcount (Latest Data)

Source: U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) FedScope, September 2024 snapshot; OPM FedScope March 2025; OPM Federal Workforce Data (FWD), December 2025 (data.opm.gov); USAFacts, November 2025; OpenFeds.org, December 2025.

The breakdown of federal employees by department as of the latest available data reveals the extraordinary imbalance in how federal work is distributed. The Department of Defense’s civilian workforce of 772,549 — entirely separate from uniformed military personnel — towers above every other agency, managing research, logistics, acquisitions, and administrative functions that underpin national security. The Department of Veterans Affairs, with 482,831 employees, operates one of the most expansive healthcare networks in the world, running hundreds of VA hospitals, community clinics, and nursing homes. Both departments saw significant restructuring in 2025, though their sheer scale has cushioned the proportional impact compared to smaller agencies.

The smallest agencies face a different picture entirely. USAID had just 3,737 employees remaining as of December 2025 (OPM FWD), reflecting a near-complete dismantlement of the agency that once administered the majority of U.S. foreign aid programs. The IRS lost approximately 26 percent of its staff between early and mid-2025, raising widespread concern from tax professionals and members of Congress about revenue collection capacity heading into the 2026 filing season. The Department of Interior’s −8.1% and Agriculture’s −7.8% workforce reductions by March 2025 impacted rural service delivery, including public land management, farm support programs, food safety inspections, and forest fire prevention operations — agencies whose constituencies are spread across every rural congressional district in the country.

Federal Employment Decline in the US 2026 – DOGE-Era Workforce Cuts (2025–2026)

Source: OPM FedScope, March 2025 release; OPM Press Release, July 1, 2025; OPM Federal Workforce Data (FWD), December 2025 (data.opm.gov); OpenFeds.org, December 2025; BLS Employment Situation — January 2026 (USDL-26-0169), February 11, 2026; Federal News Network, January 8 and November 26, 2025; MeriTalk, July 2025.

No single table in this article demands more attention than this one. The 2025–2026 federal workforce restructuring is now confirmed, from multiple independent government data sources, to be the largest in modern U.S. history. The OPM March 2025 snapshot — showing a −1.0% drop — was understood at the time to be a severe undercount, because it captured employees who were technically still on federal payrolls in pay or administrative leave status pending court resolutions. The December 2025 OPM Federal Workforce Data release, tracking 128 agencies in near-real time, provides the more complete picture: a decade-low staffing level and a net loss of nearly 220,000 employees since January 20, 2025. The BLS’s January 2026 data — released publicly on February 11, 2026, just 16 days before publication of this article — confirms the −327,000 (10.9%) cumulative drop from the October 2024 peak, with −34,000 in January 2026 alone.

The Trump administration’s stated goal of a 4-to-1 departure-to-hire ratio was confirmed by OPM Director Scott Kupor in November 2025 to have been exceeded in fiscal year 2025. Every single executive branch agency reported a net decrease in headcount for the full fiscal year — a 100 percent sweep that has no modern parallel. The −70 percent collapse in monthly federal hiring — from 23,000 new hires per month before the freeze to just 7,385 per month in February–March 2025 — has effectively shut down the pipeline of early-career talent entering government at a time when OPM itself has publicly acknowledged a looming demographic pipeline crisis: a large share of the remaining federal workforce is nearing retirement age, and replacement hiring is now running at a fraction of historical rates.

Federal Employees as a Share of US Workforce in the US 2026 – Proportion Statistics

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), Current Employment Statistics (CES); USAFacts, “How many people work for the federal government?” (November 2025); Pew Research Center, “What the data says about federal workers” (January 2025).

The proportional picture of federal employment tells a story that raw headcounts consistently obscure. While 2 million or 2.9 million sounds significant in isolation, the reality is that the federal government today represents the smallest share of total U.S. employment since the data-tracking era began in 1939. At the World War II peak of November 1944, 7.5 percent of all civilian U.S. workers were federal employees — a ratio that has never been approached since. By March 2024, the federal share (excluding USPS) had fallen to just 1.5 percent of total civilian employment. By August 2025, including USPS, it was 1.8 percent — and January 2026 cuts are pushing it lower still.

This shrinking proportional footprint has occurred even as the U.S. population has grown by nearly 200 million people since 1944. In practical terms, the federal government is being asked to do more — in terms of benefit administration, regulatory oversight, national security, and public health — with a workforce that represents a smaller fraction of the total labor pool than at virtually any point in modern history. The current restructuring accelerates this trend dramatically: if the −327,000 reduction from the October 2024 peak holds, the federal workforce’s share of total employment may reach levels not seen since the earliest years of the modern administrative state, raising serious long-term questions about institutional capacity, institutional memory, and government’s ability to respond to future crises.

Federal Employees by Workforce Characteristics in the US 2026 – Demographics and Key Features

Source: Pew Research Center analysis of OPM FedScope data, January 2025 (as of March 2024); OPM Federal Workforce Data (FWD), December 2025 (data.opm.gov); Federal News Network, January 8, 2026; BLS Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey.

The demographic profile of the federal civilian workforce reveals an employer under considerable structural strain heading into 2026. The average tenure of 11.8 years is nearly three times the median private-sector tenure of 3.9 years, but the aging skew of the workforce is increasingly pronounced. More than 28 percent of federal employees are aged 55 or older — compared to 23.6 percent of the overall workforce — while fewer than 9 percent are under the age of 30, versus 22.7 percent for all workers nationally. This demographic imbalance, combined with the near-collapse in early-career hiring following the January 2025 freeze, prompted OPM Director Scott Kupor to publicly acknowledge a “challenging demographic problem” in November 2025 — the government is not replenishing its talent pipeline at a rate sufficient to replace those expected to retire over the next five to ten years.

The union representation data from OPM’s December 2025 FWD release is equally significant: the share of the federal workforce represented by unions dropped from approximately 56 percent to 38 percent in 2025 alone, a decline driven in part by executive orders removing bargaining unit protections from large categories of federal workers. On geography, the “Washington bureaucracy” image is definitively contradicted by the data: more than 80 percent of federal employees work outside the DC-MD-VA metro area, with major concentrations in California (~147,500) and Texas (~130,000). When federal jobs are reduced, the economic impact lands on communities across the entire United States — not just on Capitol Hill.

Federal Employees by Sector and Employment Type in the US 2026 – Civilian vs. Military vs. Postal

Source: OPM Federal Workforce Data (FWD), December 2025 (data.opm.gov); OPM Press Release, July 1, 2025; BLS, CES, April 2025; Partnership for Public Service, May 2025; U.S. DOD; USAFacts, November 2025; Congressional Research Service (CRS) Report R43590.

The multiple definitions of “federal employment” are a critical point of context that any reader of these statistics must understand. The OPM FWD December 2025 figure of ~2.07 million covers the 128 executive branch agencies submitting monthly data through OPM’s EHRI system — but it excludes the Postal Service, most intelligence agencies, and the legislative and judicial branches. The OPM FedScope March 2025 snapshot of 2,289,472 used a slightly broader quarterly cut. The BLS April 2025 figure of 2,989,000 adds the Postal Service’s ~600,000 workforce, producing the most widely cited “total federal employment” benchmark. And when active-duty military (~1.3 million) are added, the total number of individuals on a federal government paycheck in 2025 reaches approximately 4.3 million.

Perhaps most importantly, none of these figures count federal contractors — the private-sector workers whose employment is entirely funded by federal contracts and grants. The Congressional Research Service (CRS Report R43590) notes explicitly that BLS federal employment data excludes contractors. Researchers have estimated this shadow workforce runs into the millions and, if counted, would produce a combined “true” federal footprint many times larger than the official OPM or BLS numbers reflect. This distinction matters enormously in 2026, as policymakers debate the scope of federal restructuring: cuts to the official headcount of 2.07 to 2.3 million may produce corresponding workforce reductions among contractors that are entirely invisible in headline data but very real in their economic impact on communities across the country.

Federal Employment Historical Milestones in the US 2026 – Year-by-Year Key Benchmarks

Source: BLS historical CES data; OPM FedScope; OPM Federal Workforce Data (FWD), December 2025 (data.opm.gov); BLS Employment Situation — January 2026 (USDL-26-0169), February 11, 2026; USAFacts, November 2025; Pew Research Center, January 2025; OpenFeds.org, December 2025; Federal News Network, January 8 and November 26, 2025.

The milestone timeline of federal employment places the current moment in stark and undeniable historical context. The span from the all-time modern peak of 3.4 million in May 1990 to the 2.07 million tracked on OPM’s Federal Workforce Data platform in December 2025 captures the long arc of a workforce reshaped repeatedly by politics, technology, economic cycles, and now deliberate executive-branch restructuring at a scale never attempted in peacetime. The 30-year gap between 1994 and 2024 — the only two occasions when total federal civilian employment cleared the 3 million mark — shows how exceptional it was that the workforce had climbed back to that level, and how rapidly it was reversed once restructuring began in earnest.

The milestones in 2025 and early 2026 are the most significant in this timeline since the post-Cold War drawdown. The January 20, 2025 hiring freeze, the Deferred Resignation Program, the reduction-in-force notices, the IRS losing roughly a quarter of its staff, USAID reduced to just 3,737 employees, and the overall net loss of 220,000 workers since Inauguration Day 2025 — all of these data points now appear in official government records from OPM and BLS. The February 11, 2026 BLS Employment Situation report (USDL-26-0169) — the most recent and authoritative federal employment data available as of February 27, 2026 — provides the definitive current benchmark: federal employment is down 327,000, or 10.9 percent, from its recent peak, with further declines expected as agency staffing plans submitted to OPM begin to take effect throughout fiscal year 2026.

Disclaimer: This research report is compiled from publicly available sources. While reasonable efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, no representation or warranty, express or implied, is given as to the completeness or reliability of the information. We accept no liability for any errors, omissions, losses, or damages of any kind arising from the use of this report.

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