Government Hiring, in Numbers

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 206,334 of those postings are open: active, and not past the close date the employer advertised. A further 202,068 postings are on file but closed, which is why an archive of 408,402 listings produces a much smaller number of things you can actually apply to.

83,524 of the open roles were posted in the last 30 days — 40.5% of everything currently open, and 12,959 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 206,334 open roles →

What government work pays

Half of the open roles that publish a pay range advertise more than $86,000. The bottom tenth sit at or below $44,117 and the top tenth at or above $182,000 — a spread that reflects a market running from seasonal municipal work to cleared engineering.

The honest caveat comes first: 101,993 of the 206,334 open roles publish a usable salary range, or 49.4% 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.

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

101,996 open roles with a published range, bucketed by the midpoint of that range.

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 39,957 of the open roles (19.4%). Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia — the national capital region, where the federal contract work sits — carry 31,152 between them (15.1%).

175,740 of the 206,334 open roles carry a state or territory we can place; the other 30,594 carry no usable location code and are excluded from the shares above. Shares are of the full 206,334, not of the located subset.

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.

Employers are ranked by live open postings, not by headcount or contract value. Contractors are the largest priced segment on the board: 36,659 of the 101,993 roles with a published range, at a median of $134,200.

How much of it is remote

Very little. 2,310 open roles are advertised as remote and 11,594 as hybrid — together 6.7% of the 206,334 open roles. The remaining 192,430 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.