Reducing Turnover in Government Agencies

The headline number surprises most people outside government: the government quits rate was 0.7% in April 2026 (BLS JOLTS via FRED series JTU9000QUR) — compared with 1.9% for total nonfarm and 2.1% for total private employment. Government workers quit at roughly one-third the rate of the broader workforce, and that structural advantage is real and enduring. It reflects pension vesting incentives, mission commitment, and salary compression that makes the calculus of leaving more complicated than in the private sector.

But the quits rate does not tell the full attrition story. Voluntary attrition — which includes both quits and retirements — ran 6.1% governmentwide in FY2021, with retirements making up approximately 53% of those departures (Partnership for Public Service, analysis of OPM data, FY2021). Retirement-driven separations carry a different kind of damage than ordinary quits: you lose people on a schedule you cannot easily change, the exits concentrate in grade bands where institutional knowledge is densest, and the federal hiring window — often 90 to 180 days from posting to onboarding — cannot rebuild that knowledge quickly.

For state and local governments, the trajectory is shaped by a different dynamic. The state and local quit rate averaged 0.7% over the 2001–2019 period before spiking to 1.1% in 2022 and declining to 0.9% in 2023 (BLS JOLTS state & local series, via MissionSquare Research Institute, State and Local Workforce: 2024 Survey Findings). The post-2022 moderation is real, but the underlying pressure — a widened public-private compensation gap and hard-to-fill technical roles — is not resolved. The engagement and retention work required at the city and county level is largely still ahead of most jurisdictions.

The most-cited statistic in government retention writing is that roughly 30% of federal employees are about to retire. That figure traces to an authoritative GAO report: 31.6% of permanent federal employees on board as of September 30, 2017 were eligible to retire within five years (U.S. GAO, GAO-19-696T). It was accurate for its time. It is now based on data nine years old.

The current OPM Federal Workforce Data platform puts the retirement-eligibility share at approximately 13.5%, down from 15%, partly reflecting the workforce reshaping since 2025 (OPM Federal Workforce Data, 2026, via Federal News Network). Writers and HR leads should use the current 13.5% figure, not the vintage 31.6%, when describing federal retirement exposure today. The two are not comparable and the gap matters: overstating near-term departure risk can misdirect succession-planning resources and produce planning documents that look alarming on paper but misidentify the timing.

What remains true is the age structure. Over 28% of the 2.1 million full-time permanent federal workforce was age 55 or above as of September 2024 (USAFacts analysis of OPM data), with an average worker age of 47.2. An aging workforce that will eventually retire is a chronic rather than acute pressure, and it demands a different planning posture: consistent knowledge transfer starting years before eligibility, active succession pipelines at the grade bands where institutional knowledge is thickest, and early-tenure retention so that mid-career employees can develop into future knowledge holders before the current ones leave.

For state and local governments, 26% of HR respondents reported that retirement-eligible employees were accelerating their retirement plans in 2024, down from 35% in 2023, while around 22% had postponed (MissionSquare, 2024). The more critical finding: 54% of state/local HR managers said the largest anticipated wave of retirements is still ahead — and only 13% had a succession-planning process in place (MissionSquare, 2024). That gap between anticipated exposure and planning readiness is the most actionable number in the state/local retirement dataset.

Government quits that are not retirements share a consistent set of drivers across FEVS analysis, MSPB exit data, and Partnership for Public Service research. The foundational finding is the engagement link: a peer-reviewed analysis of the 2015 FEVS found that federal employees with higher engagement are significantly less likely to report an intention to leave, and all three engagement factors — supervisor quality, leadership behavior, and intrinsic work experience — independently predict stay intent (McCarthy, Moonesinghe & Dean, 2020, SAGE Open). This means the drivers of avoidable exits and the drivers of low engagement are largely the same list.

The most consistent drivers:

• Mission erosion. Federal and state/local employees consistently rank mission alignment as a top reason to stay, and its perceived absence as a reason to leave. When the connection between daily work and visible public outcomes weakens — through process churn, shifting priorities, or system friction — engagement drops and exit intent follows. Partnership for Public Service and BCG research identifies mission connection as the highest-scoring engagement driver governmentwide.
• Supervisor quality at the work-unit level. The largest variance in both engagement and turnover intention lives at the work-unit level, not the agency level. A high-quality supervisor in a struggling agency retains people; a poor supervisor in a well-funded agency loses them. Partnership/BCG analysis documents that field and frontline workers — inspectors, transit, deskless field crews — score lower on engagement, recognition, and pay satisfaction than their headquarters peers, a gap explained significantly by the quality and frequency of manager contact.
• Recognition failure. Only 47% of federal employees agree that performance differences are recognized in a meaningful way — the single lowest-scoring item on the entire 2024 FEVS (OPM FEVS, 2024). Only 57% are satisfied with the recognition they receive for doing a good job. For high-caseload eligibility and benefits workers — caseworkers handling SNAP, Medicaid, child welfare — recognition failure compounds with heavy workload and compassion fatigue. Exits in this population accelerate when both acknowledgement and systems support are absent.
• Career-path opacity. Employees with no visible growth path read staying as stagnating. Mid-career technical staff who can see faster ladders in the private sector are disproportionately likely to act on that reading.

The most common objection to retention work in government is that pay is the real lever and pay is fixed. Pay does matter — and the Government Employee Retention Strategies guide addresses that candidly. But the Best Places to Work rankings show large engagement gaps between agencies on the same GS pay scale. The within-pay-band variation is large enough to prove that non-pay levers move real outcomes.

Three evidence-based, low-to-zero-cost levers that work inside Title 5:

Details, rotations, and developmental assignments Federal agencies have existing statutory authority to offer details, rotational assignments, the Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA), shadowing, and Individual Development Plans — all without new budget. OPM's Federal Rotational Cyber Workforce Program runs 6-to-12-month non-reimbursable interagency details explicitly designed to support employee engagement and talent retention. MSPB research confirms that employees whose jobs carry skill variety, autonomy, and performance feedback are more likely to perform well and less likely to exit. A caseworker who spends a rotation on policy development, or a deskless inspector who cross-trains with a city planning team, returns with renewed commitment and expanded institutional value — at no incremental cost to the agency.

Schedule flexibility OPM's own research found that, controlling for agency and demographics, employees who telework more frequently score higher on all FEVS indices than comparable onsite colleagues. Flexibility is therefore one of the cheapest retention levers available — though it is contested in the current administration's return-to-office posture, and deskless field roles (sanitation, transit, dispatch, parks crews) cannot use remote work. For those employees, the analog is schedule predictability and compressed weeks — flexibility at the shift level rather than the location level.

Frequent, non-monetary peer recognition Under 5 U.S.C. § 4503, agency heads may incur necessary expense for honorary recognition, and non-monetary peer recognition runs freely and agency-wide without touching formal award budgets or approval chains. OPM's own engagement training recommends that leaders ask employees to nominate coworkers for recognition, write personal notes to high contributors, and create visible public spaces for acknowledgement — all at zero cost. These tactics target directly the lowest-scoring FEVS domains. For deskless field staff who never see a recognition board or agency intranet during a shift, mobile delivery of that same peer recognition is the differentiator.

State and local governments face a different retention arithmetic than the federal tier. Wages are the most visible line item, and on wages the public-private gap is real at many jurisdictions. But MissionSquare data consistently shows that total compensation — especially defined-benefit pension and benefits — is a significant stay anchor that most jurisdictions fail to communicate clearly.

MissionSquare's 2024 and 2025 State and Local Workforce Surveys document that a substantial share of state and local government employees say retirement benefits and other benefits make them more inclined to remain, yet many jurisdictions lead their retention conversation with wage comparisons they cannot win. The gap between HR respondents who consider total compensation competitive and those who consider wages alone competitive is where retention messaging needs to operate — not in new pay authorities that most cities and counties cannot fund, but in helping employees understand and quantify the full value of the package they already hold.

This communication gap is especially consequential in the context of the retirement wave. State/local employees deciding whether to stay long enough to reach full pension vesting are making a total-compensation calculation, not a wage comparison. The HR and engagement leads who help employees model that calculation — through total-compensation statements, retirement projection conversations, or simple supervisor-level discussions about what the full package looks like against a private-sector alternative — are doing retention work that costs almost nothing and can meaningfully shift stay decisions. The same data that shows the retirement wave is ahead shows that only 13% of state/local governments have succession planning in place. Total-rewards messaging is not a substitute for succession planning, but it reduces the number of exits that force the succession question sooner than planned.

Recognition is both a direct retention driver and a proxy for whether the organization is listening. When employees see that survey results sat in a leadership slide deck and no visible action followed, they update their assessment of whether staying is worth it — and that update shows up in next-year scores and departure rates.

The 2024 FEVS put recognition of meaningful performance at 47% positive — the single lowest item on the entire survey (OPM FEVS, 2024). Satisfaction with recognition received sits at 57%, also among the lowest. These are not isolated concerns; OPM itself flags employee recognition as a topic needing governmentwide focus for improvement. The fix is not bigger annual ceremonies. MSPB research and OPM engagement training both point to frequent, timely, personal recognition delivered at the work-unit level — the kind that non-monetary peer recognition under 5 U.S.C. § 4503 makes possible without touching formal award budgets.

The close-the-loop discipline connects recognition to action in a way that multiplies its retention effect. When employees see a gap surfaced through a survey or manager conversation and then see a visible response — named action, named owner, progress reported quarterly — the message is that input leads somewhere. The Partnership for Public Service documents agencies using a "you spoke, we listened, this happened" pattern, communicated four times across the year, as one of the consistent behaviors of top-scoring agencies. Each completed and reported action item is a small retention investment that compounds across cycles.

For agencies that run engagement surveys at any scale, the discipline is: pick one focus area from the results, assign a named owner, take two or three concrete actions including a quick win, and talk about progress quarterly. That is OPM's own action-planning model (OPM, "A Simple Approach to Action"). Software tools like Actify can serve as the action layer here — running non-monetary peer recognition and activity-first engagement that respond to a gap the data surfaced — but Actify is not the survey or the FEVS engine. It is what happens after the loop opens. At the federal level, FedRAMP/ATO requirements gate cloud-software adoption for most agencies; Actify's strongest fit is state/local/municipal HR and deskless populations where procurement friction is lower.

Three patterns appear in agencies whose retention numbers don't improve despite real effort invested:

Cost estimates that become the story. The Partnership for Public Service estimates the cost tied to disengaged civil servants at ~$53.2 billion, derived from a Gallup figure that disengaged employees cost organizations about 34% of their salaries — a vendor-reported estimate built on an all-industry calculation. The all-industry replacement cost proxy is similarly vendor-reported (Gallup): one-half to two times annual salary, with no government-specific equivalent identified. These figures usefully calibrate the stakes of the problem. They do not calibrate what to do about it. A leadership team focused on moving a cost estimate is solving for the wrong variable. The variable that moves turnover is engagement at the work-unit level: supervisor quality, recognition frequency, and whether survey action actually happened.

Compliance theater. One-off all-hands presentations, mandatory fun events, and surveys with no visible follow-up share a common failure mode: they signal concern without producing change. Government employees experienced enough with bureaucratic process recognize the difference between a genuine response and a box-checked one. When that distinction becomes clear — typically within one survey cycle — future response rates trend down, future actions carry less credibility, and the trust needed to retain people through difficult stretches is harder to rebuild. Kettl and other observers of the FEVS cycle have documented this dynamic explicitly: breaking the collect-study-act-measure loop undercuts the entire value of the process.

Retention bonuses applied in isolation. Special-rate authorities and retention incentives are legitimate tools for acute hard-to-fill series. The consistent pattern in federal data is that bonuses delay exits rather than eliminating drivers. An employee who stayed for a bonus and finds the root condition unchanged is a retention statistic for one more year — and a credibility problem when the bonus term ends.

For the HR or engagement lead who owns the FEVS action loop, fights for budget, and must clear procurement and labor-relations gates to deploy any tool, the measurement question is: which leading indicators actually predict attrition before it shows in headcount data?

Two signal-level metrics matter most:

• Voluntary attrition disaggregated by tenure cohort and grade band. A single governmentwide voluntary attrition figure — 6.1% in FY2021, retirements ≈53% (Partnership for Public Service, OPM data) — is an aggregate that hides the distribution. Disaggregated by 0–2yr, 2–10yr, and 10+yr cohorts and by grade band, it reveals whether the problem is onboarding failure, mid-career walkaway, or retirement concentration. Each pattern requires a different lever: the intervention for a 0–2yr problem — onboarding quality, mission connection, early recognition — is nearly the opposite of the intervention for a 10+yr problem, which is succession planning, meaningful rotations, and pre-retirement flexibility options.
• Work-unit movement on close-the-loop FEVS items. Items tracking supervisor responsiveness and senior leader integrity are leading indicators for departure intent, not lagging ones. They move — up or down — in response to whether visible action followed the last survey cycle. Tracking these at the work-unit level, not the agency aggregate, tells you which units are on a trajectory that will show in attrition data months later.

What to avoid over-indexing on: agency-aggregate FEVS scores in isolation (within-agency variance is typically larger than between-agency variance, so the aggregate hides the action), and special-rate retention rates as a general indicator (they measure a short-term tool, not the underlying condition).

For state and local HR leads, FEVS is not the instrument — MissionSquare, Gallup Q12, or local survey tools serve that role — but the measurement discipline is the same: disaggregate by unit, track leading indicators, and measure close-the-loop follow-through. The tool that generated the data matters less than whether the data generates visible action.