Government Employment & the Public Service

How many Canadians work for government by level, and inside the federal public service

Two definitions matter throughout this topic, because they are easy to conflate:

A companion page covers federal spending, and the Public Finances page compares Canada’s government finances with OECD peers.

Employment by level of government

The chart below counts jobs in public administration, the core bureaucracy of each level of government, back to 1997. Local government (municipalities and regional/Indigenous administrations) and the federal government are the largest. Provincial and territorial public administrations are smaller because much of what provinces fund (schools, hospitals, universities) is delivered by institutions counted separately.

The public sector

“Government workers” are far more than the bureaucracy. The Labour Force Survey counts everyone whose employer is a government, a public institution, or a government business enterprise. This was about 4.5 million people in 2025. Grouped by industry, the two largest parts are public education (teachers and professors) and public health care and social services (nurses, hospital and long-term-care staff). Each of these groups employs more people than public administration, the core bureaucracy across all three levels of government combined. Crown corporations and other public services (e.g., utilities, public transit) make up the rest. Use the dropdown to switch between the total headcount and employees per 1,000 people, which adjusts for Canada’s population growth.

Ranked for the latest year, public administration is only the third-largest part of the public-sector workforce, behind public education and public health care:

How Canada compares

Across the OECD, the share of total employment that works for general government (the OECD’s term for the public sector across all levels, including public health and education staff) varies widely. It is under 10% in Japan and South Korea, while it is nearly 30% in the Nordic countries. Not every peer reports this measure to the OECD, so some countries are absent.

Latest year, ranked

Inside the Federal Public Service

The rest of this page narrows to the federal public service as Treasury Board counts it: the core public administration plus separate agencies (such as the Canada Revenue Agency and Parks Canada), measured as a headcount on March 31 each year. It excludes the Canadian Armed Forces and RCMP regular and civilian members, who are reported under their own frameworks.

Total headcount over time

The federal public service has moved in waves, with periods of expansion and contraction.

Which parts of the public service grew

The federal public service stood at about 345,000 people in 2026. That was roughly 90,000 more than in 2015, though down from a peak of about 368,000 in 2024. Stacking the largest departments over time shows where the workforce sits and how it has shifted. For example, the Canada Revenue Agency and Employment and Social Development Canada (which runs Service Canada) are the two biggest, alongside defence, corrections, border services, procurement, and fisheries. There are 100+ smaller departments and agencies, which are grouped as Other. Departmental names and boundaries shift with reorganizations, so this should be read for the broad trends.

NoteOn “areas,” and on reorganizations

Federal jobs are not published by occupation or role over time, so this shows growth by department. This is the closest available view of where the workforce expanded. It compares departments that kept the same name across the period; machinery-of-government changes that created or split organizations (for example Shared Services Canada in 2011, and the 2017 split that created Indigenous Services Canada) shift staff between departments and so do not appear as “growth” here.

Where federal public servants work

The largest federal employers are the service-delivery and operational organizations: the Canada Revenue Agency, Employment and Social Development Canada (which runs Service Canada), National Defence’s civilian workforce, Correctional Service Canada, Public Services and Procurement Canada, and the Canada Border Services Agency. Because departments are periodically renamed, merged, and split, this is shown as a current-year snapshot rather than a time series.

Executives in the federal public service

The executive cadre (the EX group) is available as a consistent series. As a share of all employees it has held fairly steady, moving within a narrow band of roughly 2.4% to 2.6% since 2010.

NoteWhat about scientists, economists, and front-line roles?

Federal jobs are classified into occupational groups. Examples include EC (Economics and Social Science Services, the economists and social-science researchers), SE/AP (the scientific and applied-science/ engineering groups), CS/IT (information technology), FB (Border Services), PA (Program and Administrative Services — much of the front-line and administrative workforce), and EX (Executive).

A clean, comparable count of these groups over time is, unfortunately, not published as machine-readable open data, and the classification itself has been reorganized repeatedly. (The occupational categories were repealed in 1993; the 1999 Universal Classification Standard consolidated some 72 groups into 29; the CS group was later converted to IT.) Those breaks make a long-run series misleading, which is why this page does not chart one.

Who works in the public service

Ageing. Like much of the workforce, the federal public service has a large share of employees in their 40s and 50s.

Tenure. The large majority hold indeterminate (permanent) positions; terms, casuals, and students make up a smaller, more variable share.

Where they work. The National Capital Region (Ottawa–Gatineau) is the single largest concentration of federal public servants. However, most public servants work outside it, delivering services across the country.

Sex. Women have been a majority of the federal public service throughout the series and their share has edged up.

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