OPM withholds the salary of nearly half the federal workforce, and not at random

The Office of Personnel Management's file of the federal civilian workforce holds 2,024,832 employees in the month this hub leads with. It publishes an annual salary for 999,162 of them, 49.3%. For another 68,638 it gives no annual salary and does not mark the pay withheld: they are paid hourly, per diem or on another basis, or have no pay recorded. For the remaining 957,032, 47.3% of the file, where the salary would be it prints the word redacted.

That missing part is not a sample of the whole. The Department of Defense alone is 680,072 of the withheld salaries, 71.1% of them, and every one of its 680,072 employees is withheld. With Homeland Security and Justice, three departments account for 922,947, or 96.4%. Of the 125 departments in the file, 64 have no employee whose salary is withheld.

Whose, and why

OPM's Data Release Policy says whose, and the file follows it. Defense sets its own policy for record-level data on its employees, and OPM forwards those requests to Defense. The policy names ten security and sensitive agencies, among them the FBI, Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Bureau of Prisons. Their employees stationed outside the Washington area have their pay withheld. It names twenty-six occupational series in any agency, among them criminal investigators, border patrol agents, correctional officers and police. And it allows OPM to withhold the pay of anyone whose performance rating could be worked out from it.

So the share varies with what a department does. Homeland Security withholds 76.1% of its employees' salaries and Justice 66.3%, because the policy's agencies and occupations sit inside them. Veterans Affairs withholds 1.3%.

What this means for any figure about federal pay

An average salary across "the federal workforce" drawn from this file is an average across the half whose salary is published, and that half leaves out most law enforcement and all of Defense. A department's average can move because the mix of who is published changed, not because anyone's pay did. So every pay figure on this hub is printed beside the number of employees it covers, and the withheld share sits beside every ranking.

What the file does not say

It doesn't say which part of the policy applied to a given employee. The reasons above are the policy's own, and this brief doesn't explain any department's share beyond them. The file also isn't the whole workforce: the intelligence community and some Defense positions aren't in it at all.