Federal Employees in the Physical Sciences and Engineering

Using data from the US Office of Personnel Management’s (OPM) FedScope , we developed these dashboards to help stakeholders examine and understand trends and changes in the civilian Federal physical sciences and engineering workforce.
We provide a map view that reveals the broad distribution of these federal employees in every state in March of 2024. California, Maryland, and Virginia lead the way with over 50,000 employees in physical science and engineering jobs. An additional 120,000 colleagues are employed in the remaining 47 states, US territories, and other countries.
We also provide a graphic view which shows the total number of employees from 1998 through 2023. This view can be parsed by agency, combination of agencies, or a specific occupation code. For each year, we provide

• the number of employees,
• the average salary for each employee,
• the average length of service for each employee,
• the distribution of employees by age group, and
• an estimate of the proportion of the workforce eligible for retirement.
• We use the number of employees 60 years of age with 20 years of experience or 65 years of age with 5 years of experience as the cutoffs.
• Limitations in the data set do not allow us to look for employees who are 62 – 64 with 5 years of experience, so the numbers we provide are low-end estimates.

These numbers do not include employees of federally-funded research and development centers (FFRDCs). The National Science Foundation (NSF) maintains the master list of FFRDCs . The National Laboratory Directors’ Council reported more than 80,000 total staff at 17 national labs funded by the Department of Energy as of July 31, 2024. One of the DOE labs (National Energy Technology Lab ) is not an FFRDC, so their employees are included in this dataset.

The two dashboards provide views for different periods. The above dashboard provides the most up-to-date data available for March 2024. The below dashboard provides longitudinal data from 1998 to 2023 for September of each year. Currently, OPM releases employment datasets quarterly; however, before 2010, only the dataset for September was released yearly. The two views allow users to see both the most recent and most holistic view of the civilian Federal physical sciences and engineering workforce.