Federal Employees in the Physical Sciences and Engineering

(Last Updated: April 2025)

The public sector is a major employer of physical science and engineering professionals. As part of the 2025 AIP Research Agenda , we focused on understanding and exploring changes in the civilian federal physical science and engineering workforce. We present interactive dashboards that focus on the federal workforce using data from the US Office of Personnel Management’s (OPM) FedScope.

These dashboards contain the most recent data from OPM; however, these data do not cover the period of major cuts and changes made to the federal workforce in early 2025. These tools are helpful for understanding the extent of the federal workforce before these changes occur. We will continue to update these tools as more data becomes available.

This set of interactive dashboards includes one tool that shows the geographic locations of employees in the physical science and engineering fields, and a second that contains more than 25 years of data on federal employees’ job titles, average salaries, average lengths of service, age distribution, and other characteristics. Our other set of dashboards focused on appointment types and agencies involved with physical science research is accessible here .

The first tool in this set shows a map view that reveals the broad distribution of these federal employees in every state in September of 2024. California, Maryland, and Virginia lead the way with over 50,000 employees in physical science and engineering jobs. An additional 120,000 colleagues are employed in the remaining 47 states, US territories, and other countries.
The second tool provides a graphic view that shows the total number of employees from 1998 through 2024. This view can be parsed by agency, a combination of agencies, or a specific occupation code. For each year, we provide the number of employees, the average salaries, average length of service, the distribution of employees by age group, and an estimate of the proportion of the workforce eligible for retirement.

We use the number of employees 60 years of age with 20 years of experience or 65 years of age with 5 years of experience as the cutoffs for retirement eligibility. Limitations in the data set do not allow us to look for employees who are 62 – 64 with 5 years of experience, so the numbers we provide are low-end estimates.
These numbers do not include employees of federally-funded research and development centers (FFRDCs). The National Science Foundation (NSF) maintains the master list of FFRDCs . The National Laboratory Directors’ Council reported more than 80,000 total staff at 17 national labs funded by the Department of Energy as of July 31, 2024. One of the DOE labs (National Energy Technology Lab ) is not an FFRDC, so their employees are included in this dataset.

The below dashboard provides longitudinal data from 1998 to 2024 for September of each year. We will continue to update these tools as more data become available. Currently, OPM releases employment datasets quarterly; however, before 2010, only the dataset for September was released yearly.