2024 Washington State Employee Compensation Survey (WSECS)

The Office of Financial Management – State Human Resources is required by law (RCW 41.06.160) to conduct a salary and benefits survey. The survey's goal is to compare the state's compensation and fringe benefits (these are benefits outside of your pay) to other public and private employers within Washington.

We use benchmark jobs to compare base pay with our peers. A benchmark job is the state's version of a comparable job in the market. We also collect information about pay practices (such as pay premiums and paid time off), retirement benefits, and health care benefits.

The state considers retirement and health care benefits valuable components of total compensation. These benefits provide important context to Washington's compensation practices, especially when we compare state employees to other government or private employers.

Our state government must attract a diverse, inclusive, and talented workforce to best serve Washington. This means our workplace needs to focus on competitive employee flexibility, mobility, engagement and compensation.

This report does not define the appropriate compensation level for our workforce. Instead, state leaders can use it as a tool to find the appropriate balance among:

• Containing government operations costs
• Compensating state employees fairly
• Competing for specialized employees in the job market

2024 Survey Results

• 2024 WSECS State Report 

• The 2024 WSECS result dashboards provide interactive views of the benchmark, paid leave and survey participant results found in the 2024 WSECS state report.

• 2024 WSECS report data tables [.xlsx] pending

• 2024 WSECS benchmark crosswalk [PDF] is a spreadsheet you can use to find the benchmark job for a specific job class

• 2024 WSECS methodologies overview [PDF] describes the methodologies and definitions used for the survey

• 2024 WSECS FAQ [PDF]

If you have additional questions about the survey, contact us at classandcomp@ofm.wa.gov.