Agency Administration: Highest Paid Federal Jobs in HR and EEO

Average salaries can vary widely between agencies in the federal government for a number of reasons—the most obvious one being that the skill sets required for jobs in some agencies are much different than in other agencies.

Even if that is the case, there are some jobs that exist in every agency. Human resources management (HR) is one such job. One might assume that an agency with tens of thousands of employees would necessarily pay a much higher salary than an agency with a few hundred employees. That is not the case as can be seen in the listing of highest paid human resources management jobs below.

Human Resources

Agencies often use different terms and titles for human resources employees in an agency. We queried the FedSmith database of federal employees salaries using common titles to isolate two of the most common administrative jobs.

The first listing below shows the highest paid human resources management jobs (by agency) in the federal government. The total number of agency employees and the salaries are from data provided by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) for fiscal year 2017. As the chart shows, there is not always a relationship between the number of employees in an agency and the highest paid human resources job.

For example, the National Credit Union Administration had about 1,152 employees listed when the fiscal year 2017 salary database was created and the highest HR job in the agency paid $262,000. The Department of Homeland Security had almost 191,000 employees and the highest paid HR job in that agency was $187,000.

Some, probably most, of the agencies with the highest paid administrative positions are also agencies that are not under the traditional General Schedule pay system used throughout the federal government. Many of these agencies, such as the FDIC or the SEC, pay higher salaries than other agencies on the supposition that higher salaries are necessary to attract people with the expertise necessary to perform the primary mission of the agency.

The agencies with the highest average salaries are usually the ones with the highest paid administrative personnel as well.

The salary information is from the listing of individual federal employee salaries at FedsDataCenter.com.

Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO)

Another position common to all agencies is equal employment opportunity (EEO). As with HR management positions, there is sometimes little correlation between the number of agency employees and the salary paid to people in EEO positions.

Here is a listing of the highest paid positions in the federal government for positions categorized as Equal Employment Opportunity: