How to use BLS salary and employment trend data to guide public workforce decisions.
A city manager approving a 3 percent cost-of-living raise for public works staff is making a bet against private-sector employers who just posted double-digit wage gains. That is the paradox public administrators now face: the topline labor figures used to justify budgets rarely capture what is happening inside their own workforce.
July 2026 data show U.S. wages from new job postings climbing 2.01% month over month to $84,513, with public administration salaries up only 1.57% for the month and 2.80% year over year, reaching $64,781, well behind professional services and hospitality.1
That gap is not cosmetic. It shapes recruitment, retention, and bargaining leverage in ways aggregate reports obscure, and it demands a more granular reading of labor statistics than most agencies currently bring to the public policy process.
Which labor statistics should a public administration professional actually monitor when making hiring, budget, and bargaining decisions?
Public administrators often inherit reports full of aggregate employment figures, but those headcounts hide more than they reveal. A workable labor data foundation includes five distinct families, and each one answers a different policy question.
Headcount without turnover misses churn. An agency can hold total positions steady while losing experienced staff and replacing them with newcomers, which can quietly reduce service quality. Wages without vacancy data misses competition. A salary may look reasonable against past pay, but a high vacancy rate can show that private employers are pulling candidates away. Unionization without occupational mix misses exposure. A heavily unionized workforce matters differently if the jobs are nurses and engineers rather than clerical and maintenance roles.
These are analytical inputs, not interchangeable aggregates. Public administrators should track them together because the blend changes the interpretation.
A city budget office may need vacancy and time-to-fill data to justify staffing requests when service cuts are on the table. A state human resources agency setting pay bands needs salary benchmarks by occupation and sector, not only the state's own payroll history. One team asks whether it can fill positions; the other asks whether it can price them competitively.
The same dataset cannot answer both unless the administrator first knows which question is being asked. That is why the five core families matter less as separate indicators and more as a shared foundation for evidence-based policymaking on recruitment, retention, budget planning, and collective bargaining.
The table below draws on 2024 Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the most recent national estimates available as of mid-2026. Reading across the 25th percentile, median, and 75th percentile columns reveals how wide the pay band is within each occupation. A narrow spread (as seen with Postmasters and Mail Superintendents) signals a compressed, step-based pay structure typical of federal systems, while a wide spread (as with Chief Executives) reflects the enormous variation between small municipal leaders and top federal agency heads. Public administrators can use these benchmarks to compare government compensation packages against equivalent private-sector roles, a theme explored in greater detail later in this article.
| Occupation | Total Employment | Mean Annual Wage | 25th Percentile | Median Annual Wage | 75th Percentile |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chief Executives | 211,850 | $262,930 | $126,080 | $206,420 | Not published |
| General and Operations Managers | 3,584,420 | $133,120 | $67,160 | $102,950 | $164,130 |
| Legislators | 26,510 | $67,390 | $29,120 | $44,810 | $80,350 |
| Transportation, Storage, and Distribution Managers | 213,000 | $116,010 | $78,360 | $102,010 | $136,050 |
| Postmasters and Mail Superintendents | 13,810 | $93,760 | $87,150 | $92,730 | $99,590 |
The July 2026 salary data from Revelio Labs reveal a widening competitive gap between public administration and several private sector industries. While the national average salary from new job postings reached $84,513, public administration posted an average of $64,781, trailing professional and business services by more than $30,000 and growing at a fraction of the pace. For MPA and MPP practitioners focused on workforce planning, the table below underscores why talent retention and recruitment remain urgent policy challenges. Data are drawn from the Revelio Labs Public Labor Statistics release published August 6, 2026, which tracks average salaries in new job postings across 15 industry sectors.
| Sector | Average Salary (July 2026) | Month-over-Month Change | Year-over-Year Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total US (All Sectors) | $84,513 | +2.01% | +17.09% |
| Information | $103,226 | +0.22% | N/A |
| Professional and Business Services | $95,451 | +1.97% | +12.79% |
| Financial Activities | $91,637 | +0.60% | N/A |
| Utilities | $87,384 | +0.72% | N/A |
| Mining, Quarrying, and Oil and Gas Extraction | $78,637 | -0.04% | +5.52% |
| Construction | $74,232 | +0.46% | N/A |
| Education and Health Services | $70,722 | +0.87% | N/A |
| Public Administration | $64,781 | +1.57% | +2.80% |
| Wholesale Trade | $63,236 | +0.27% | N/A |
| Unclassified | $63,228 | +0.69% | -5.65% |
| Other Services (except Public Administration) | $58,952 | +0.84% | N/A |
| Agriculture, Forestry, Fishing and Hunting | $52,135 | -0.44% | -7.58% |
| Leisure and Hospitality | $47,902 | +0.97% | +22.98% |
Local governments remain the backbone of public employment in the United States, accounting for nearly two thirds of all government jobs. Yet the federal workforce saw the steepest year-over-year contraction in July 2026, shrinking by 8.6%, while state and local payrolls held relatively steady. Understanding this composition is essential for workforce planning: budget decisions, hiring strategies, and retention policies differ sharply at each level of government.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects Management Occupations will add 959,600 jobs nationally between 2023 and 2033, a 7.3 percent increase,1 while Community and Social Service Occupations, which house many public-facing roles like social and community service managers, are projected to grow 8.1 percent (247,000 new jobs).1 These are the numbers public administrators should be pulling directly from source tables, not summarizing from third-party blogs.
The two BLS products you want are the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) program and the Employment Projections (EP) program. OEWS gives you current employment and wage data by occupation, and you can filter by industry, including NAICS 92 (Public Administration), to isolate government employers at the federal, state, and local levels. The EP program publishes the National Employment Matrix, which crosses occupations by industry and shows projected change over the ten-year horizon.
Both tools let you download full datasets as Excel files. Pull the matrix, filter to the industries that match your agency's function (public administration, health services, social assistance, education), and sort by projected percent change or numeric change. That workflow surfaces which public administration jobs inside your workforce are expanding and which are contracting, without relying on any secondary interpretation.
BLS projections cover total U.S. employment, not public-sector-only headcount. A projection that Administrative Services Managers will grow 4 percent through 20332 tells you the occupation is expanding across all industries, but not how much of that growth lands inside government payrolls. Similarly, the fastest-growing occupations list includes substance abuse, behavioral disorder, and mental health counselors at 17 percent from 2024 to 2034,3 but most of those jobs sit outside government payrolls. To close the gap, consult workforce reports from OPM, state civil service commissions, and municipal HR offices, and lean on professional associations such as the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA) and the International City/County Management Association (ICMA) for practitioner-level context on public sector hiring, retirements, and pipeline gaps.
MPA and MPP program pages at accredited universities often curate BLS outlook data for common MPA or MPP career paths: budget analysts, urban planners, emergency management directors, policy analysts, social and community service managers. These curated summaries are a useful starting map before you dive into the raw OEWS files, particularly when BLS does not publish a standalone "public administration" projection and you need to assemble the picture occupation by occupation.
Public sector pay is rising, but not fast enough: a 2.80% annual gain in public administration salaries can't compete with double digit growth in professional services and hospitality, and that gap is a workforce planning problem, not just a statistic.
