The US Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has released a 5-year comparison of compensation in the public and private sectors that indicates that federal civilian employees as a group earn wages that are 2% higher than private sector employees.
It’s the area of benefits where federal employees jump far ahead of private employees. The defined-benefit pension plans of federal employees boost benefit costs to a premium of 48% over private employee benefit costs according to CBO estimates.
Total compensation paid to federal employees was 16% higher than that paid to private employees. Again, defined-benefit pension plans, which are much less common for private sector employees, account for virtually all the difference.
Federal employees account for about 1.7% of the total 2010 US workforce, down from 2.3% of the total workforce in 1980.
The full report is available here.
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