thousands of persons - Source frequency: semiannual · Methodology · Corrections
Australia's public service headcount was 196.3 thousands of persons as of June 2026. Total Australian Public Service (APS) headcount — ongoing and non-ongoing employees at 30 June and 31 December. It covers the APS only, not the Defence Force or agencies outside it. Tracks the size of the federal public service over time. Changes reflect government policy priorities and service delivery capacity. Data is sourced from Australian Public Service Commission, APS Employment Data (biannual release, data.gov.au): Table 1 total of ongoing and non-ongoing employees. and updated every six months.
Total Australian Public Service (APS) headcount — ongoing and non-ongoing employees at 30 June and 31 December. It covers the APS only, not the Defence Force or agencies outside it.
Tracks the size of the federal public service over time. Changes reflect government policy priorities and service delivery capacity.
This data is sourced programmatically from official statistical APIs and data feeds (Australian Public Service Commission, APS Employment Data (biannual release, data.gov.au): Table 1 total of ongoing and non-ongoing employees.), updated every six months. The source link above points to the human-readable publication page, which presents the same underlying data in a different format (e.g. Excel workbook, PDF release). Our pipeline fetches the machine-readable version automatically and converts it to the standardised format shown here.
See all sources and methodology on the data sources page.
