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The government job market · October 10, 2026

Government hiring data

There are 201,750 open U.S. government and government-contractor jobs on Ayla as of October 10, 2026, from 4,054 employers; the median advertised salary is $91,291. That median is taken over the 124,298 open roles that publish a pay range.

201,750
Open roles today
$91,291
Median advertised salary
4,054
Employers hiring
109,519
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 201,750 of those postings are open: active, and not past the close date the employer advertised. A further 351,740 postings are on file but closed, which is why an archive of 553,490 listings produces a much smaller number of things you can actually apply to.

109,519 of the open roles were posted in the last 30 days — 54.3% of everything currently open, and 16,094 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 201,750 open roles →

What government work pays

Half of the open roles that publish a pay range advertise more than $91,291. The bottom tenth sit at or below $44,117 and the top tenth at or above $185,000 — a spread that reflects a market running from seasonal municipal work to cleared engineering.

The honest caveat comes first: 124,298 of the 201,750 open roles publish a usable salary range, or 61.6% 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$133,87653,262
State government$63,55225,170
Federal agency$64,91016,845
School district$55,79012,740
City government$66,4874,050
Public university$63,6313,705
County government$74,4733,045
Public health system$86,8401,857

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 $50K23,79819.1%
$50K - $75K25,59220.6%
$75K - $100K18,08514.5%
$100K - $125K16,90913.6%
$125K - $150K14,00411.3%
$150K+25,91020.8%

124,298 open roles with a published range, bucketed by the midpoint of that range.

Highest average advertised pay, by state
StateAveragePriced roles
Washington, D.C.$136,9642,960
Maryland$131,6794,896
Massachusetts$127,0022,544
Virginia$126,6898,935
Washington$124,6672,849
Colorado$118,9724,933
Oregon$112,718364
Connecticut$112,478951

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 36,907 of the open roles (18.3%). Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia — the national capital region, where the federal contract work sits — carry 26,090 between them (12.9%).

State or territoryOpen rolesShare of board
California36,90718.3%
Virginia15,9687.9%
Texas12,6866.3%
Florida9,0464.5%
Maryland6,1613.1%
New York5,6802.8%
Colorado5,4082.7%
North Carolina5,2272.6%
Washington4,1512.1%
Washington, D.C.3,9612.0%

169,982 of the 201,750 open roles carry a state or territory we can place; the other 31,768 carry no usable location code and are excluded from the shares above. Shares are of the full 201,750, not of the located subset.

Cities with the most open roles
Washington, DC2,786
Los Angeles, CA1,551
San Francisco, CA1,444
Costa Mesa, CA1,371
Huntsville, AL1,339
Austin, TX1,294
McLean, VA1,195
Seattle, WA1,190
San Diego, CA1,165
Arlington, VA1,105

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 Service15,425
Lockheed Martin5,834
RTX (Raytheon)5,055
Northrop Grumman3,824
Amentum2,898
Veterans Health Administration2,770
Medical University Of South Carolina (Musc)2,756
SpaceX2,752
Anduril Industries2,553
Booz Allen Hamilton2,251

Employers are ranked by live open postings, not by headcount or contract value. Contractors are the largest priced segment on the board: 53,262 of the 124,298 roles with a published range, at a median of $133,876.

How much of it is remote

Very little. 3,270 open roles are advertised as remote and 15,552 as hybrid — together 9.3% of the 201,750 open roles. The remaining 182,928 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. Open roles, employers and the median advertised salary for every state and territory also download as one file: the state summary (CSV).

Frequently asked questions

Where can I get government hiring data?

Here, free. Ayla tracks open federal, state, local and contractor jobs from 700+ official sources, with the employer and pay on each posting.

Which agencies are hiring the most?

This page ranks employers by open roles right now. The monthly Government Hiring Report adds OPM hires and separations by federal agency.

Where does the data come from?

Official job systems: USAJobs, all 50 state portals, cities, counties and contractor career sites. Federal hires and separations come from OPM's Federal Workforce Data.

How is this different from OPM data?

OPM counts federal employees and past hires. Ayla adds the jobs open now, at every level of government and at contractors, with posted pay.

Can I use the data?

Yes. The charts, the CSV and the public API are free; please cite Ayla (aylagov.com).

These figures, every month

The Government Hiring Report, monthly. Email only. Hiring for a role? Send us a role