About OpenFeds

What is this?

OpenFeds is a data journalism project that makes federal workforce data accessible and explorable. We process raw data from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) FedScope dataset to reveal patterns in federal employment, salaries, hiring, and separations.

Data Sources

OpenFeds uses two distinct types of OPM FedScope data: employment snapshots and flow data. Employment snapshots capture the state of the federal workforce at a single point in time — who works where, in what occupation, at what salary. Flow data (separations and accessions) tracks employees entering and leaving federal service over time, enabling trend analysis.

All data from OPM FedScope. FedScope is a public data source maintained by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.

Update Schedule

OPM publishes FedScope data on a monthly basis. OpenFeds currently reflects:

We update OpenFeds after each new OPM data release. There is typically a 1–2 month lag between the end of a reporting period and when OPM publishes the corresponding data.

Methodology

Limitations

• Civilian only. FedScope covers civilian federal employees only. Active-duty military personnel, federal contractors, and U.S. Postal Service employees are not included (USPS publishes its own workforce data separately).
• Military agency salary redaction. Salary data for Department of Defense military agencies (DD, AR, AF, NV) is redacted by OPM. These agencies show "N/A" for salary figures rather than misleading $0 values. Employee counts for these agencies are still accurate.
• Privacy redactions. Some records have values marked as "REDACTED" or "*" to protect individual privacy, typically when a combination of attributes would identify a specific person. These records are excluded from salary and demographic calculations but included in headcounts.
• Snapshot vs. flow data. The employment snapshot is a point-in-time view (December 2025), while separations and accessions data spans FY2020–2025. An agency's current employee count may not match the net of historical accessions and separations due to agency reorganizations, reclassifications, and data corrections.
• OPM reporting lag. There is a 1–2 month lag between events and their appearance in FedScope data. Recent months may undercount separations or accessions that have not yet been processed.

Embeddable Charts

OpenFeds offers embeddable charts that you can include on your own website via iframe. Each embed is a self-contained HTML page with no external dependencies.