47 Federal Occupations Are Recruiting More Than in 2025. Headcount Is Still Down in 45.

The federal government is advertising for thousands of information-technology specialists, management analysts, human-resources officers, attorneys, physicians and mechanics again. That is not the same as rebuilding the workforces those occupations lost.

FederalHiringData identified 83 sufficiently large occupational series that lost at least 500 covered employees and at least 5% of headcount during 2025. Forty-seven of them now meet a second test: at least 100 official USAJOBS announcements from Jan. 1 through Aug. 28, 2026, and more announcements than in the same period last year.

Those 47 series produced 87,154 occupation-announcement matches this year, up 79.8% from the depressed 2025 level. After removing controls that appeared in more than one queried series, they represent 84,259 unique announcements.

But the latest complete workforce record shows a different stage of the cycle. The 47 occupations lost 142,855 employees in 2025, then lost another 36,706 through May 2026. Forty-five remained below their December headcount. Across the cohort, January-May separation actions exceeded accessions by 10,662.

The result is an occupation-level recruiting rebound without an occupation-level workforce recovery. Agencies are seeking many of the skills they reduced, but advertising, selecting and onboarding occur on a different clock from departures. A posting is not a hire, and a higher posting count does not put an employee back on the payroll.

The screen finds a rebound, not every federal occupation

The analysis begins with workforce stock, not job-board impressions.

Using the Office of Personnel Management's monthly employment records, FederalHiringData compared December 2024 with December 2025 for every four-digit occupational series. To prevent tiny specialties from dominating percentage rankings, an occupation had to begin with at least 2,500 covered employees. It then had to lose at least 500 employees and at least 5% during 2025.

That produced 83 cut candidates. FederalHiringData queried the official USAJOBS Historic JOA interface for each series over the same Jan. 1-Aug. 28 window in 2024, 2025 and 2026. The recruiting cohort includes only candidates with at least 100 2026 primary-series announcements and a 2026 count above 2025.

The definition is deliberately strict and deliberately conditional. It does not say all 83 occupations are hiring again. Thirty-six did not pass the official announcement screen. In some, the USAJOBS primary-series query returned fewer than 100 records. In others it returned no usable comparison records, even where related work may appear under secondary categories or different series. A zero API result is not proof of zero recruiting.

The 47 selected series are where the evidence of renewed public recruiting is strongest. They span administration, technology, healthcare, law, engineering, finance, security, science, logistics, education, trades and custodial work.

Headcount fell before recruiting began to recover

The selected cohort employed 1,101,811 people in December 2024. By December 2025, it employed 958,956, a decline of 142,855, or 13.0%.

That contraction occurred during a year of unusually restrictive federal staffing policy. The January 2025 hiring freeze stopped most executive-branch civilian hiring subject to stated exemptions. A February workforce-optimization order directed agencies toward a general ratio of no more than one hire for every four departures and told them to prepare for large-scale reductions in force. Those policies did not treat every agency or occupation alike; public-safety, immigration-enforcement and national-security functions received explicit exceptions.

By October, a new continued-accountability order replaced the broad freeze with strategic staffing controls. Hiring could resume, but it remained selective and tied to agency plans.

The OPM stock data show why a resumption should not be confused with a restoration. By May 2026, the latest complete month, the cohort had fallen to 922,250 employees. That was another 36,706 below December.

Only two selected occupations were larger in May than in December: Maintenance Mechanic, series 4749, gained 511 employees, and General Legal and Kindred Administration, series 0901, gained 32. The other 45 remained smaller.

That endpoint requires an important correction. OPM's August release notes say the June 2026 Status and Dynamics files are missing approximately 83,000 Department of War records from 32 components because of a processing change. Using June without adjustment would turn missing Defense submissions into apparent workforce losses. FederalHiringData therefore uses May, which OPM released without a significant completeness warning, as the latest comparable stock and action month.

The largest losses were not confined to one kind of work

The biggest numerical decline was in series 0301, Miscellaneous Administration and Program: 19,600 employees in 2025. The category is broad, covering program and administrative work that does not fit a more specific series. Management and Program Analysis, 0343, lost 17,093. Information Technology Management, 2210, lost 13,986.

Clerical and assistant work, attorneys, contracting, business, human resources and financial administration also appear near the top.

These are occupation-wide totals across covered agencies, not positions eliminated and reposted one by one. The data cannot identify whether an announcement replaces a specific departure, expands a different office or fills a role that was always vacant. It cannot measure the cost of reducing and later recruiting a skill.

It does show that the rebound reaches capabilities agencies use to run hiring and acquisitions themselves. Human resources, contracting, budget, finance, program management, logistics and IT all contracted, then returned to the public job board at higher volume than in 2025.

The posting recovery is large because the 2025 base was so low

Across the 47 series, official primary-series announcement matches fell from 143,635 in the comparable 2024 period to 48,483 in 2025, a 66.2% decline. They rose to 87,154 this year.

That 79.8% year-over-year gain is substantial. It is also a rebound from an extraordinary low. The 2026 count remains 39.3% below 2024.

Forty of the 47 selected occupations remain below their 2024 announcement level. Seven are at or above it, but two of those seven have no returned records in the earlier comparison years, which makes the apparent recovery less informative. Medical Officer, General Attorney, Practical Nurse, Psychology and Custodial Working have clean nonzero histories and are at or above 2024 volume.

Series 0301 illustrates the denominator problem. Its 8,454 matches are 63.0% above 2025 but 50.5% below 2024. Management and Program Analysis more than doubled from 2025 and still sits 55.6% below 2024. Information Technology Management rose 78.4% from 2025 and remains 44.1% below 2024.

In other words, "hiring again" and "back to normal" are not interchangeable claims.

Postings, actions and payroll move on different clocks

Personnel actions provide a bridge between recruiting visibility and workforce stock, but not a perfect one.

From January through May, the 47 occupations recorded 24,469 accession actions and 35,131 separation actions. Nine had more accession than separation actions. Only two had higher May headcount than in December.

Maintenance Mechanic is the clearest rebuild case. It recorded 1,197 accessions and 402 separations through May, a positive action balance of 795. Headcount rose by 511. Its 1,381 official announcement matches were 48.0% above 2025, although still 29.4% below 2024.

Miscellaneous Clerk and Assistant offers the opposite caution. It recorded 2,782 accessions and 2,557 separations, a positive action balance of 225, while its month-end headcount fell by 2,258. Movements within government, processing dates, conversions, corrections and source coverage can cause action counts and stock to diverge.

The same is true at larger scale. Information Technology Management recorded 1,468 accessions and 2,447 separations through May, while headcount fell 3,744. Management and Program Analysis recorded 794 accessions and 2,086 separations, while headcount fell 3,824. Series 0301 recorded 2,073 accessions and 4,807 separations, while headcount fell 5,334.

These action totals are not unique people. A transfer can count as an accession in one place and a separation in another. They should be read as the direction and scale of processed movements, not as a closed accounting ledger.

Healthcare and legal recruiting moved faster than the aggregate

Not every occupation is still below its 2024 posting pace.

Medical Officer, series 0602, returned 4,498 official matches this year, up from 3,193 in 2025 and 2,853 in 2024. Veterans Affairs accounts for 3,924 of the 2026 series matches, making healthcare demand highly concentrated. Yet Medical Officer headcount fell by 2,318 in 2025 and another 934 through May.

Practical Nurse, 0620, produced 2,231 matches, above both 2025 and 2024. Veterans Affairs supplied 1,872. Its stock fell by 1,046 in 2025 and another 185 through May, even though accession actions exceeded separations by 74 in the current period.

Psychology, 0180, reached 2,043 matches, roughly even with 2024 and above 2025. The occupation remained 134 below December headcount in May.

General Attorney is another outlier. Its 2,392 2026 matches were more than triple the 752 returned for 2025 and above the 2,068 in 2024. Justice supplied 941. The series nevertheless remained 1,374 below December stock in May after losing 6,608 in 2025.

Those cases argue against a single governmentwide story. Some occupations have already restored or exceeded public recruiting visibility. Their payroll stock can still lag because hiring takes time, separations continue and announcements do not always yield accessions.

Defense drove the largest share of the selected losses

Department patterns reinforce the occupational findings. Defense accounted for 45,312 of the cohort's 2025 headcount decline. Veterans Affairs accounted for 15,513; Health and Human Services, 11,551; Treasury, 10,050; Agriculture, 9,667; Justice, 6,906; and Homeland Security, 5,762.

Those departments also appear prominently in the 2026 announcement set. Veterans Affairs led with 17,506 unique announcements connected to the selected series. Navy posted 11,621; Air Force, 11,558; Army, 10,013; the department-level Defense category, 9,007; Justice, 5,816; and Homeland Security, 3,754.

The agency detail is even more concentrated. Veterans Health Administration accounted for 16,324 unique announcements. Army National Guard Units produced 3,247; Commander, Navy Installations Command, 2,982; the Bureau of Prisons, 2,729; Army Installation Management Command, 2,449; and Military Treatment Facilities under the Defense Health Agency, 2,295.

These two panels use different denominators. The top panel is covered employee change in selected occupations. The bottom is unique announcements connected to those occupations. An announcement can advertise multiple openings, and no honest calculation can subtract one panel from the other to infer a staffing gap.

The overlap is still meaningful. Departments that shed large numbers of workers in the selected occupations are visibly recruiting those skill families again. The public data stop short of showing how many offers were accepted or how many employees reached the payroll.

The rebound is geographically broad, with important redaction

Among disclosed duty stations, the largest selected-occupation declines in 2025 occurred in Maryland, down 16,201; the District of Columbia, down 14,040; Virginia, down 6,634; Texas, down 4,971; California, down 4,655; Georgia, down 3,770; and Florida, down 3,171.

Geography is incomplete. Another 48,078 of the cohort's net decline sits in records whose state is redacted. That is one-third of the total loss and too large to treat as a footnote. It prevents a complete state ranking.

The 2026 announcement locations cluster in many of the same large federal labor markets. The District of Columbia appears on 9,504 unique announcements; Virginia on 9,172; California on 7,316; Texas on 7,057; Maryland on 5,717; Florida on 4,786; Georgia on 3,562; Pennsylvania on 3,399; Washington on 3,371; and New York on 3,215.

One announcement can list several states, so those location counts cannot be added into a national announcement total. They show where the selected occupations are being advertised, not where hires ultimately report.

The geographic pattern also complicates the idea that rebuilding is purely a Washington story. The capital region is prominent, especially for administrative, analytical and legal work. Healthcare, installation support, public safety, engineering and trades spread recruiting across states and overseas locations.

Permanent jobs dominate the visible rebound

The selected 2026 announcement set is not mostly temporary. Of 84,259 unique controls, 77,555, or 92.0%, carry a Permanent appointment label. Temporary announcements account for 1,926; term, 1,779; multiple appointment types, 1,235; temporary promotions, 887; and smaller categories the remainder.

Related research

Put this finding in context

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Workforce/August 28, 2026

The Federal Workforce Was Ordered Back to Offices. Washington-Area Headcount Fell by 47,998.

OPM records show Washington-area headcount and share fell after the 2025 return-to-office order as separations surged and hiring contracted.

Workforce/August 28, 2026

Federal Bargaining-Unit Coverage Fell by 579,903. Most of That Was Not Job Loss.

Federal represented bargaining-unit coding fell by 579,903 through May 2026. Defense drove 45% of the change, but the count is not job loss or union membership.

That finding matters because a wave of short-term postings would support a different interpretation. Agencies are publicly advertising predominantly permanent roles in the occupations they reduced.

It still does not prove permanent staffing recovered. OPM stock for the selected occupations shows permanent covered headcount falling from 1,021,227 in December 2024 to 900,134 in December 2025 and 865,433 in May 2026. Nonpermanent stock fell from 80,188 to 58,641 and then 56,691.

The General Schedule grade pattern is similarly broad. In 2025, selected-cohort GS headcount fell 21.6% at grades 5-8, 15.0% at grades 9-12 and 15.4% at grades 13-15. Through May, those bands declined another 4.6%, 3.7% and 4.8%. The small GS 1-4 group rose by 201 after a 1,928-person decline in 2025.

Available pay data do not show a dramatic downshifting. After excluding seven series with missing or implausibly nonannual average-pay values, the headcount-weighted nominal average across 40 series was $72,081 in December 2024, $71,206 in December 2025 and $71,656 in May 2026. The valid subset covers about 90% of selected headcount.

That is a composition statistic, not a raise calculation. OPM warns that salary is redacted for many employees, and a changing mix of occupations and grades can move the average even when no individual receives the implied change.

What is still shrinking despite recruiting

The matrix is strongest when it refuses to turn renewed advertising into a recovery claim.

Contracting, series 1102, lost 5,844 employees in 2025 and another 1,242 through May. Its 1,556 announcement matches were 28.8% above 2025 but 58.5% below 2024.

Financial Administration and Program, 0501, lost 4,212 in 2025 and another 1,004. Its 2,087 matches were 79.6% above 2025 and 50.8% below 2024.

General Engineering, 0801, lost 3,432 and then another 1,616. Its 2,836 matches were 70.5% above 2025 and 40.5% below 2024.

Human Resources Management lost 5,638 and then another 1,491. Its announcement count rose 63.8% from 2025 but remained 48.0% below 2024. That is especially relevant to the speed of any rebuild: agencies need HR specialists to classify positions, assess applicants and process appointments, yet the HR occupation itself remained smaller.

The same tension appears in IT and management analysis. Those functions can support modernization, cybersecurity, data systems and program oversight, but the data do not measure unmet workload or prove a particular operational consequence. They establish only that the workforce stock fell while recruiting visibility began to return.

The public answer is: hiring has resumed selectively

People asking whether agencies are hiring again are not imagining the change. In these 47 occupations, official public announcement matches are nearly 80% above the same 2025 period. The rebound includes permanent roles and reaches large agencies across the country.

But the answer needs a second sentence. The same occupations were still 36,706 employees smaller in May than in December. Forty-five of 47 had not regained even their year-end stock, and 40 remained below the 2024 announcement pace.

The most accurate description is selective reopening before recovery.

For job seekers, announcement volume is directly useful: it identifies where agencies are inviting applications now or recently did so. It does not reveal the number of hires behind each notice, the competition, the time to selection or whether future recruiting will continue at the same pace. Current openings should be checked on FederalHiringData's jobs directory and USAJOBS; this article's announcement comparisons include past postings and are not a list of open positions.

For workforce oversight, the next test is whether public recruiting becomes accession activity and then stable headcount. July OPM data are expected after this article's workforce endpoint. The June file must first be corrected or interpreted with its Defense gap. One or two complete months will not erase the need for longer comparison, but they can show whether more of the nine positive-action occupations begin to register stock growth.

The evidence available now answers the central question with more precision than a governmentwide headline. Agencies are recruiting some of the occupational skills they reduced. In almost every selected series, the workforce has not yet come back.

Methodology and limitations

FederalHiringData analyzed OPM Federal Workforce Data Employment stock for every four-digit occupational series at December 2024, December 2025 and May 2026. The cut screen required at least 2,500 employees at baseline, a numerical loss of at least 500 and a decline of at least 5%. The June 2026 stock is not used because OPM reports approximately 83,000 missing Defense records. OPM's data-download documentation defines Employment as a last-day-of-month stock and Dynamics as processed accession and separation actions.

For the 83 cut candidates, FederalHiringData made bounded official USAJOBS Historic JOA queries for PositionSeries over Jan. 1-Aug. 28 in 2024, 2025 and 2026. The recruiting cohort required at least 100 2026 matches and more than 2025. All 2026 pages for the 47 selected series were fetched serially, reconciled to the official total and archived. Cross-series duplicate controls were removed for the 84,259 unique-announcement count.

The USAJOBS series filter reflects the primary occupational code associated with an announcement. Local historical job-category tags can include secondary or expanded classifications, so they are not substituted into the official comparison. Some series return zero in earlier years; zero is reported as an API result, not proof that no related jobs existed.

Announcements are not vacancies, applications, referrals, selections, offers or hires. One can list multiple positions, grades, series and locations. Personnel actions are not unique people and do not mechanically equal stock changes. Covered headcount is not a budget FTE ceiling. The analysis cannot establish that an agency eliminated and later reposted the same position.

Appointment stock groups OPM codes into permanent and nonpermanent categories; invalid or unknown codes remain separate. Pay analysis excludes seven series with missing or implausibly nonannual averages below $10,000 at any endpoint and is nominal, composition-sensitive and not a same-worker comparison. Geography is limited by 48,078 net losses in redacted-state records.

The underlying occupation matrix is available in the downloadable data file. The hero photograph shows a civilian hiring official speaking with attendees during a Space Training and Readiness Command career fair in April 2026. It is a public-domain U.S. Space Force image by Brandon Kalloo Sanes distributed through DVIDS.