2026 Government & Public Sector Salary Report
This page is designed to do more than show a single chart. It gives job seekers, recruiters, and market watchers a practical view of compensation bands, where the highest disclosed pay appears, how much of the market still hides pay, and what these postings imply for negotiation strategy. If you are comparing offers, targeting a move into public-sector engineering, or validating whether your compensation is competitive, use this report as a starting point and then jump back into the MeWannaJob search experience to find matching roles.
Executive summary
This dataset shows a market with meaningful upside for experienced technical talent, but not a perfectly transparent one. A substantial portion of listings still omit pay entirely, which makes disclosed ranges even more valuable. Among the roles that do publish compensation, upper-end salaries are concentrated in senior engineering, infrastructure, and specialized public-sector technical roles. In plain English: strong pay exists, but it tends to sit behind narrower titles, more senior scope, or organizations with clearer compensation policies.
That matters for both search strategy and negotiation. If you are targeting public-sector engineering or adjacent roles, the opportunity is not simply to find any posting with a salary band. It is to identify which employers regularly disclose pay, which titles map to your experience, and which sectors look willing to support six-figure compensation with stable benefits and long-term career growth. This report helps surface those patterns.
What the salary bands suggest
Employers that disclose pay are often signaling stronger process maturity and a clearer level structure. That can reduce guesswork for candidates and improve your ability to benchmark roles before you invest time in an application.
How candidates can use this data
Use the published ranges to decide where to focus, set compensation expectations, and avoid underpriced roles. When several similar titles cluster around the same pay band, that cluster becomes a strong negotiation reference point.
1) Overall pay distribution (annualized midpoints)
- Median disclosed midpoint: $98,457 (IQR: $87,264–$121,509).
- Typical band (10th–90th percentile): $73,855–$159,795.
2) What’s driving higher pay?
- Engineering roles in utilities/civil work frequently sit at the top end (median: $118,130).
- Software roles with disclosed pay cluster in the high-five to low-six figures (median: $98,244).
- Audit/Data roles show wide ranges because they span entry-to-manager bands (data median: $83,816, audit median: $97,438).
- Many private-sector listings here (notably Disney orgs) omit pay ranges entirely, which inflates the “undisclosed pay” share.
3) Pay by primary industry
4) Where pay is disclosed
5) Pay disclosure by employer
6) Industry summary (numeric ranges only)
| Primary industry | count | median | mean | min | max |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unspecified | 10 | $120,328 | $129,172 | $87,264 | $165,738 |
| Engineering | 14 | $118,130 | $119,071 | $75,666 | $165,738 |
| Software | 14 | $98,244 | $95,005 | $49,920 | $134,846 |
| Audit | 5 | $97,438 | $87,423 | $65,516 | $102,692 |
| Data | 7 | $83,816 | $93,231 | $69,014 | $132,683 |
7) Highest disclosed pay ranges
| job_title | company_name | job_location | primary_industry | pay_range_annual |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Assistant Electric Utility Engineer | City of Santa Clara | Santa Clara, CA | Engineering | $145,678 – $185,797 |
| Assistant Electric Utility Engineer | City of Santa Clara | Santa Clara, CA | Unspecified | $145,678 – $185,797 |
| Senior Civil/Traffic Engineer | City of Modesto | Tenth Street Place - 1010 10th Street Modesto, CA | Engineering | $141,294 – $180,315 |
| Senior Civil/Traffic Engineer | City of Modesto | Tenth Street Place - 1010 10th Street Modesto, CA | Unspecified | $141,294 – $180,315 |
| Senior Engineer | Klickitat Public Utility | Goldendale, WA 98620 | Engineering | $135,826 – $183,764 |
| Senior Engineer | Klickitat Public Utility | Goldendale, WA 98620 | Unspecified | $135,826 – $183,764 |
| SENIOR CIVIL ENGINEER | City of Solana Beach | Solana Beach, CA | Engineering | $128,315 – $186,888 |
| SENIOR CIVIL ENGINEER | City of Solana Beach | Solana Beach, CA | Unspecified | $128,315 – $186,888 |
| Limited Term HR Analyst / Sr HR Analyst | Mesa Water District (Mesa Water) | Costa Mesa, CA | Software | $113,402 – $156,291 |
| Resource Recovery Analyst (Analyst III) | City of Portland | 5001 N Columbia Blvd., OR | Data | $109,845 – $155,522 |
| Software Engineer | Santa Barbara County Education Office | Santa Barbara - Goleta | Engineering | $106,272 – $138,048 |
| Associate Engineer (Building Division) | City of Oceanside | CA, CA | Unspecified | $105,288 – $139,032 |
Methodology
This report is generated from job-listing salary disclosures rather than self-reported compensation. Where employers published hourly or monthly pay, those figures were annualized into comparable yearly ranges. The midpoint ranking helps normalize broad salary bands, but it should not be treated as a guarantee of offer level. Final compensation can still vary based on tenure, certifications, location policy, pension structure, and internal leveling.
The dataset also includes duplicate detection because the same role can appear more than once across feeds, categories, or reposts. Salary transparency remains incomplete, so undisclosed postings are tracked separately rather than estimated. As you expand this page over time, one of the highest-value additions will be history: monthly snapshots, year-over-year comparisons, and title-specific trends for software, data, IT, and engineering roles.
How to read this report
- Listings shows total postings included in this slice of the market.
- Numeric pay ranges counts postings with usable salary data.
- Undisclosed pay highlights how much of the market is still opaque.
- Top ranges surfaces the highest annualized midpoint values, which helps identify the most premium opportunities in the current sample.
Because this report mixes public-sector, utility, and adjacent employers, the page is most useful as a directional benchmark rather than an absolute ranking of the entire labor market. Over time, splitting this into narrower category pages such as software engineering, civil engineering, data, and analyst roles will make the insights even stronger for SEO and for candidate decision-making.
Next steps on MeWannaJob
If this report helped you identify promising salary bands, the next move is to turn insight into action. Go back to the MeWannaJob home page, upload your resume, and let the site match you against current opportunities. You can use what you learned here to prioritize public-sector roles, investigate specific employers, and build a more focused application strategy around the compensation levels you actually want.
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