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Census Data Allows for Comparison of State Government Employment Figures

At over $83 million per month, California spends the most of any other state on full-time payroll for state workers in financial administration, according to recent employment data released by the U.S. Census Bureau.

Data is broken down by job function - from financial administration to libraries, housing, and public welfare, to name just a few categories - as well as by year and state. Users can view the information in table form, or download the data into an Excel spreadsheet for further manipulation and analysis.

For example, we plugged the data into a spreadsheet we created to compare the number of state employees to overall population to find that Hawaii has the highest total number of state government employees per capita.

Upon further analysis, we found that on a per capita basis, Delaware takes the number one position when it comes to state workers employed in the area of corrections, but Alaska has the highest ratio of state employees to total population in several other categories, including financial administration, highways, and public welfare.

In addition to state government employment data, the Census Bureau also provides Local Government Public Employment & Payroll statistics . The local government data is presented in summary form (for the entire U.S.), but data for each individual state is also available.

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