The federal government had 2,682,000 people on its payroll in September, down from 2,914,000 in September 2025, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Both counts are seasonally adjusted, and the September number is preliminary. On those two published levels, the federal workforce is about 232,000 jobs smaller than it was a year ago.

Federal employees, contractors and the shops and landlords that depend on federal offices all want the same thing from that number: a sense of whether the shrinking is still under way. The monthly payroll table says it has mostly stopped. The federal count was 2,686,000 in July, 2,683,000 in August and 2,682,000 in September, a one-thousand-job dip in the latest month.

BLS revises the federal count with every monthly jobs report, and the next one is scheduled for Nov. 6.

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The agencies shrank, the Post Office did not

BLS counts the U.S. Postal Service inside the federal total, which hides where the cuts landed. Federal employment excluding the Postal Service fell from 2,321,500 in September 2025 to 2,083,300 in September 2026, a drop of 238,200 on the table’s figures. The Postal Service went the other way, from 592,700 to 598,400, a gain of 5,700.

So the cut sits in federal agencies, not in the Postal Service. BLS does not break the agency number down by department in this release, and it does not say why the count fell. The table is a headcount of jobs on payrolls, not a record of layoffs, buyouts or retirements.

A plateau since the summer

The year-over-year gap is large, but most of it was already in place by July. Between September 2025 and July 2026, the seasonally adjusted federal count slid from 2,914,000 to 2,686,000. Since then it has moved by 4,000 jobs in two months. In September alone, all of government shed 17,000 jobs, according to BLS’s summary table, while the federal line moved by one thousand.

Government as a whole stood at 23,327,000 in September against 23,543,000 a year earlier, a decline of 216,000. Subtracting the federal totals from both years leaves state and local government roughly 16,000 jobs higher than a year ago, a figure computed from the published rows rather than reported by BLS.

The broader labor market around it is soft but not collapsing. BLS’s September employment report, released Oct. 2, said total nonfarm payroll employment “changed little” at +29,000 and that the unemployment rate held at 4.2 percent, with 7.1 million people unemployed. Health care, by comparison, grew from 18,181,800 to 18,553,600 over the year. For workers who kept their jobs, average hourly earnings were $37.81, up 3.0 percent from 12 months earlier, and the same summary table shows government adding 8,000 jobs in September 2025, so the direction in the public sector has clearly reversed.

Washington carries the local weight

The federal payroll is national, but the loss is not spread evenly. In a separate BLS metro release published Sept. 30 for August, the Washington-Arlington-Alexandria area had the largest over-the-year employment decrease of any of the 387 metropolitan areas: 66,000 jobs. The metro’s nonfarm count fell from 3,365,600 to 3,299,600, or 2.0 percent, not seasonally adjusted.

That figure covers every employer in the metro area, not only federal agencies, and it measures August, not September. BLS does not attribute the drop to any one cause. The District of Columbia’s own row in the same table shows a decline of 26,200 jobs. The next-largest decline in the release was Portland-Vancouver-Hillsboro, at 18,800 jobs, less than a third of the Washington loss.

The other large changes in the release run the opposite direction. Houston added 44,700 jobs over the year, the largest gain of any metro area.

Following the federal count month to month

The number to track is the Federal line in Table B-1 of BLS’s monthly Employment Situation report. The next one, for October, is scheduled for Friday, Nov. 6, 2026. BLS marks the August and September figures preliminary, so the 2,682,000 can still be revised.

Anyone comparing the federal line from one report to the next should check that the series is the same. Seasonally adjusted and not seasonally adjusted figures differ by a few thousand jobs in the same month, and the Postal Service is included in the headline federal total but can be separated using the “except U.S. Postal Service” line directly below it.

Local readers should use the metro tables rather than the national one. BLS’s next metro release, covering September, is scheduled for Oct. 28, and it will show whether the Washington area’s 66,000-job gap widened or narrowed against a year earlier.

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This article was produced with AI assistance and edited for accuracy against the sources linked above.