Live market data
The government job market · 12 September 2026

Government Hiring, in Numbers

There are 212,509 open government and government-contractor roles on Ayla right now, advertised under 6,326 distinct employer names. Among the 100,461 that publish a pay range, the median advertised salary is $84,000.

212,509
Open roles today
$84,000
Median advertised salary
6,326
Employers hiring
89,408
Posted in the last 30 days

What is on the board today

Ayla aggregates open postings from federal, state, county, city and territorial governments, plus the contractors that staff federal programs. Today 212,509 of those postings are open: active, and not past the close date the employer advertised. A further 207,229 postings are on file but closed, which is why an archive of 419,738 listings produces a much smaller number of things you can actually apply to.

89,408 of the open roles were posted in the last 30 days — 42.1% of everything currently open, and 12,209 close within the next seven days. Public-sector hiring runs on published deadlines rather than rolling review, so that closing figure is the part of the board that is genuinely perishable.

Search all 212,509 open roles →

What government work pays

Half of the open roles that publish a pay range advertise more than $84,000. The bottom tenth sit at or below $44,117 and the top tenth at or above $175,500 — a spread that reflects a market running from seasonal municipal work to cleared engineering.

The honest caveat comes first: 100,461 of the 212,509 open roles publish a usable salary range, or 47.3% of the board. Every pay figure on this page describes that subset. The rest advertise a grade, a step, a union scale or nothing at all, and we would rather show you the share than quietly average over it.

Median advertised salary by employer type
Employer typeMedianPriced roles
Government contractor$130,50033,724
State government$65,51626,752
Federal agency$58,03018,829
School district$55,7239,321
City government$66,9843,423
Public university$63,0002,440
Public health system$86,8401,683
County government$80,8841,573

Employer types with at least 250 priced open roles. The median is taken over the midpoint of each advertised range.

Open roles by pay band
Advertised payRolesShare
Under $50K22,49522.4%
$50K - $75K21,63021.5%
$75K - $100K15,42715.4%
$100K - $125K13,12013.1%
$125K - $150K10,30610.3%
$150K+17,48317.4%

100,461 open roles with a published range, bucketed by the midpoint of that range.

Highest average advertised pay, by state
StateAveragePriced roles
Washington, D.C.$127,4601,656
Virginia$123,34810,913
Maryland$117,2905,118
Colorado$115,5902,967
Tennessee$109,081528
California$107,83022,303
New Jersey$107,469403
Oregon$106,791362

States with at least 250 priced open roles, so a handful of senior postings cannot carry a whole state to the top of the table.

Compare government pay by role and grade →

Where the jobs are

Government hiring is not spread evenly, and where it concentrates is a procurement map as much as a population map. California alone carries 40,783 of the open roles (19.2%). Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia — the national capital region, where the federal contract work sits — carry 31,701 between them (14.9%).

State or territoryOpen rolesShare of board
California40,78319.2%
Virginia22,42710.6%
Texas9,8194.6%
Florida7,0733.3%
Maryland6,9353.3%
North Dakota4,9442.3%
Pennsylvania4,9082.3%
Ohio4,5912.2%
New York4,5382.1%
Colorado3,8891.8%

180,115 of the 212,509 open roles carry a state or territory we can place; the other 32,394 carry no usable location code and are excluded from the shares above. Shares are of the full 212,509, not of the located subset.

Cities with the most open roles
Huntsville, AL1,553
Washington, DC1,380
Costa Mesa, CA1,308
San Francisco, CA1,308
Los Angeles, CA1,305
McLean, VA1,226
San Diego, CA1,173
Austin, TX1,145
Arlington, VA1,138
Chantilly, VA946

City as published on the listing. Postings that name a region, a state or "various locations" instead of a city do not appear here.

See the interactive hiring map →

Who is hiring

The employers below are ranked by open postings on the board today, counting each employer under the name its own job board publishes. Agencies and contractors are ranked together, because a job seeker choosing between a federal role and the contractor supporting that same program is choosing inside one market.

United States Postal Service7,958
Leidos6,519
Booz Allen Hamilton5,399
RTX (Raytheon)5,141
General Dynamics IT4,179
Northrop Grumman3,955
DXC Technology3,641
Veterans Health Administration3,522
Amentum2,878
SpaceX2,430

Employers are ranked by live open postings, not by headcount or contract value. Contractors are the largest priced segment on the board: 33,724 of the 100,461 roles with a published range, at a median of $130,500.

How much of it is remote

Very little. 2,354 open roles are advertised as remote and 11,976 as hybrid — together 6.7% of the 212,509 open roles. The remaining 198,179 are on-site.

Read from the work-arrangement field on each listing. No open listing is missing that field, which means the on-site bucket also absorbs every posting that simply never said — treat it as an upper bound.

Browse remote government jobs →

How these numbers are counted

  • Open means the listing is active and either carries no close date or has not reached it. Archived listings and cross-source duplicates are excluded, which is the same rule the job search itself uses — the totals here and on the job pages are the same totals.
  • Pay is the midpoint of the range the employer advertised, counted only where a range is published and falls between $15,000 and $500,000. Ranges outside that window are almost always a data artefact rather than a salary.
  • Location is the state, territory and city named on the listing. Nothing is inferred from an employer's headquarters.
  • Freshness. Sources are re-scraped on a rolling schedule, and these aggregates are recomputed at most once every fifteen minutes. This page is then served from an hourly cache, so it can trail the live board by up to an hour.
  • The same figures are public. They come from /api/analytics/market-overview, /salary-distribution, /salary-insights and /geographic, which are open, free and unauthenticated.