Visualization: Local government employment by state and function

An interactive visualization of local government employment, grouped by state and function.

These are local government employees only. State and federal government employees are not included.

Source of data is United States Census Bureau, Local Government Employment and Payroll Data: March 2016. The program’s page is Annual Survey of Public Employment & Payroll (ASPEP).

In the visualization, I’ve multiplied the March payroll number by 12 to produce an approximation of annual payroll. Using each state’s population for each year, I’ve also computed the annual payroll on a per-resident basis and the number of full-time equivalent (FTE) employees per thousand residents.

These are local government employees only. State and federal government employees are not included. Sometimes this causes discrepancies that need to be understood by considering other data. For example, Hawaii has no local employees in elementary and secondary education, as it has one school district which is run by the state. (1)Wikipedia. Hawai’i Department of Education. Available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawai%27i_Department_of_Education. Because education is a large expense for local governments (in most cases), Hawaii, in these charts, ranks as the state with the lowest number of government employees, considering only local government employees.

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Example from the visualization. Click for larger.

References

References
1 Wikipedia. Hawai’i Department of Education. Available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawai%27i_Department_of_Education.