Federal Employee Salaries Grew 4.7% Last Year

It’s technically correct that federal salaries got a 1 percent raise last year and the year before that. Also true that federal employees will get at least a 1.3 percent raise this year.

What this doesn’t tell you is that the average federal employee wage in Washington, D.C. grew by 4.7 percent last year.

The reason for this is likely because of individual promotions and step increases that would add to the wage growth in addition to the one percent hike for everyone.

In any case, the average percentage of DC wage increase is more than the combined wage hike that all federal employees in general have received in the last few years.

This according to a report compiled by the Center for Regional Analysis at George Mason University. It shows that federal employee salaries grew to $105,491 on average in 2014. That’s a 4.7 percent growth as compared to 2013.

By comparison, private sector wages in DC grew by only 1.2 percent to $79,095, while state and local wages in DC actually tanked 4.2 percent to $71,651.

The pattern is the same in the wider Washington, D.C. metropolitan region that includes parts of suburban Maryland and northern Virginia. The parts of Maryland that come under the metro area showed a 1.8 percent increase in the average federal employee wage, while the increase in Virginia was 2.8 percent.

Overall, the Washington metro area clocked a 3.6 percent average growth in federal employee salaries. By contrast, the private sector wage growth was just 0.1 percent and the state and local employees received a 0.3 percent wage growth.

This pegs the overall average growth of wages in the Washington metro area at 0.5 percent, which is a huge difference compared to the 4.7 percent growth in federal employee salaries in DC. Shows that federal employment in DC literally pays off a lot better than anything else in the entire region.