State government workforce (ASPEP)
State government full-time-equivalent employment and March payroll for the nation and every state, from the Census Bureau's employment survey.
Publisher
- Organization
- U.S. Census Bureau
- Publisher’s dataset
- Annual Survey of Public Employment & Payroll
- File or API used
- https://api.census.gov/data/timeseries/govsemp
- Retrieval script
scripts/fetch-census-aspep.py- Methodology
- https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/apes/technical-documentation/methodology/25_methodology.pdf
Coverage
- Geography
- Nation and every state (the District of Columbia has no state-government row in this survey; see caveats)
- Time coverage
- 1992-2025
- Update frequency
- Annual
- Published
- not stated
- Retrieved
- September 9, 2026
- License of the records
- Public domain. U.S. federal government work.
- Rows
- 3,370 observations, 1992-2025
Measures
| Measure | What it measures | Unit |
|---|---|---|
| State government employment (FTE) | Full-time-equivalent state government employment, all governmental functions combined, for the pay period including March 12 of the survey year. | count |
| State government payroll (March) | Gross full-time state government payroll, all governmental functions combined, for the one-month pay period including March 12 of the survey year, in current dollars. | usd |
Caveats
- ASPEP measures full-time-equivalent employment for the pay period including March 12, not the ACFR's June 30 full-time headcount; the two are different statistics.
- FTE before 2019 summed full-time employees and part-time hours reported; from 2019 on, part-time hours are not collected and FTE is modeled from 2014-2018 data.
- The Census Bureau did not conduct ASPEP in 1996; no observation exists for that year.
- The District of Columbia has no state-government row: ASPEP classifies its government entirely as local, not state.
Where sources disagree
- State government employment (FTE), Idaho, 2025: transparent-idaho publishes 22,045. The Census Bureau's Annual Survey of Public Employment and Payroll gives Idaho state government 26,543 full-time-equivalent employees for the pay period including March 12, 2025, versus 22,045 state employees in the FY2025 ACFR (dataset transparent-idaho-acfr, government.state_employees). The survey counts every state government unit including higher education and computes full-time equivalents from hours; the ACFR reports its own headcount on its own basis and date. Both are kept.
How to cite
Understand Idaho, “Annual Survey of Public Employment & Payroll”, compiled from U.S. Census Bureau, Annual Survey of Public Employment & Payroll. Retrieved September 9, 2026. https://understandidaho.com/data/census-aspep/.
Cite U.S. Census Bureau directly for the figures themselves.
This page was last updated .