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Population of the federal public service by tenure

From: Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat

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About the data

When reading the table below, the following information applies:

  • Source of information: Pay System as of of each year.
  • The federal public service consists of 2 population segments: the core public administration and separate agencies.
  • Departments and agencies in the core public administration are named in schedules I and IV of the Financial Administration Act. The Treasury Board is the employer of this segment of the federal public service.
  • Separate agencies are named in Schedule V of the act. Separate agencies conduct their own negotiations or set their own classification levels for their employees.
  • Included in this information are:
    • active employees of all employment tenures (indeterminate, term, casual and student)
    • Governor in Council appointees
    • deputy ministers
    • federal judges
  • Excluded from this information are:
    • inactive employees (i.e., employees on leave without pay)
    • ministers’ exempt staff
    • employees locally engaged outside of Canada
    • RCMP Regular Force members
    • RCMP Civilian members
    • Canadian Forces members
  • Population counts for the following separate agencies are not included because their employee information is not available in the Pay System:
    • Canadian Security Intelligence Service
    • National Capital Commission
    • Canada Investment and Savings
    • Canadian Forces Non-Public Funds
    • Security Intelligence Review Committee (before 2010)
Population of the federal public service by tenure
Tenure Year
2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023
Core public administration
Casual 7,267 7,679 6,716 6,663 7,963 8,601 9,123 7,413 8,277 8,880 8,440 9,182 9,527 8,508
Indeterminate 190,734 192,061 190,546 180,530 173,101 170,592 169,651 172,877 178,189 187,498 196,300 205,811 213,329 227,952
Student 4,943 4,852 4,602 3,727 4,185 4,471 4,763 4,857 5,771 6,278 6,643 6,266 6,827 7,004
Term 13,652 12,632 10,164 9,596 10,081 11,901 13,817 14,510 16,039 17,615 19,753 24,453 24,601 27,279
Unknown 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 34 36 44 40 27 25 55
Total 216,596 217,224 212,028 200,516 195,330 195,565 197,354 199,691 208,312 220,315 231,176 245,739 254,309 270,798
Separate agencies
Casual 25 27 27 29 39 62 128 92 120 104 133 154 121 135
Indeterminate 53,092 53,096 52,598 49,753 49,620 49,076 48,893 49,597 50,531 52,147 53,673 56,856 58,147 63,029
Student 1,185 1,039 816 878 1,004 1,029 949 1,424 1,655 1,878 2,209 1,798 2,099 2,199
Term 12,082 10,966 12,623 11,641 11,145 11,302 11,655 11,879 12,930 13,530 13,257 15,052 21,276 21,082
Unknown 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 13 23 9 2 2 5 4
Total 66,384 65,128 66,064 62,301 61,808 61,469 61,625 63,005 65,259 67,668 69,274 73,862 81,648 86,449
Federal public service
Casual 7,292 7,706 6,743 6,692 8,002 8,663 9,251 7,505 8,397 8,984 8,573 9,336 9,648 8,643
Indeterminate 243,826 245,157 243,144 230,283 222,721 219,668 218,544 222,474 228,720 239,645 249,973 262,667 271,476 290,981
Student 6,128 5,891 5,418 4,605 5,189 5,500 5,712 6,281 7,426 8,156 8,852 8,064 8,926 9,203
Term 25,734 23,598 22,787 21,237 21,226 23,203 25,472 26,389 28,969 31,145 33,010 39,505 45,877 48,361
Unknown 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 47 59 53 42 29 30 59
Total 282,980 282,352 278,092 262,817 257,138 257,034 258,979 262,696 273,571 287,983 300,450 319,601 335,957 357,247

Open datasets

This information is published in HTML, XML and CSV formats and is part of the government’s Open Data Portal. The portal offers machine-readable formats, enabling citizens, private sector and non-government organizations to leverage this data in innovative and value-added ways.

For more information, review the Open Data Licence Agreement, visit the Open Data Portal or browse more datasets.

Available formats

Data file Description
Population of the federal public service by tenure
(XML version – 22 KB)
(CSV version – 3 KB) 		These data present population counts by tenure for the federal public service (all departments and agencies governed by the Financial Administration Act (FAA) Schedules I, IV and V) from to .

Glossary of key terms

To assist you with your analysis of Federal Public Service human resources data, we have compiled a glossary of key terms that are used in many of the Office of the Chief Human Resources Officer’s (OCHRO) demographic snapshots and reports. This glossary has been developed to help provide a common language across OCHRO’s demographic snapshots and reports.

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