Q&A - Break Down of Federal Employee Payday

Q&A of the day – About the $128,000 federal employee payday  

It’s the Q&A of the day. Each day I’ll feature a listener question that’s been submitted by one of these methods.  

Email: brianmudd@iheartmedia.com 

Twitter: @brianmuddradio 

Facebook: Brian Mudd https://www.facebook.com/brian.mudd1 

Feel free to shoot away with your questions and I’ll do my best to keep up. Today’s question comes from Bobby. 

I read your piece on the fed employees average salary and it left me speechless.  

I went online and couldn’t match your quoted figure of $128K. Is that because you included all fringe benefits (eg, health insurance etc?). If so, would a safe estimate w/o fringe be about 70% of the total, ie about $90K? Still very high!

Bottom Line: Yesterday in my story: How much federal employees earn and how much you pay them, I shared the real cost you pay annually for federal government employees. As a quick reminder, it's $15,200 per household. It’s a staggeringly high real cost for all of us to pay for federal employees that man the 430-federal agencies at an average total cost of $128,000 per employee. 

Now, that $128,000 figure is the total compensation cost to us. Meaning that it includes salary and benefits. In the context of the conversation of the cost to us it doesn’t matter how much of that’s base salary, but for some background that averaged $89k as of 2016 vs benefits. It's hard costs that we have to pay for annually. The average private sector employee earns $49,000 per year while working an average of 12% more hours as well.  

Also, as I pointed out yesterday, if approximately 25% of the federal government that’s shutdown stayed shut down for the entire year, we’d save $3,800 per household this year. I’ve still yet had someone say they’d rather not have an extra $3,800 in their own money to end the partial government shutdown to ensure we’d pay all of those employees that $3,800 instead.  

Photo By: Win McNamee/Getty Images


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