Question 1: How many federal employees are in Maryland, and what are they making?

 

There are 144,497 federal employees in Maryland. The state says 11,000 have already been laid off and they expect 17,000 more to be laid off.

 

Our data obtained from the White House through an open records request shows 111,151 of the federal employees in MD.  A few agencies like the Department of Defense redacted employees’ locations when we requested their payroll, so there’s still some federal workers in Maryland we can’t identify.

 

Those employees earned a total salary of $14.37 billion in 2024.

 

The federal workers in our Maryland data are making an average of $130,536. That’s almost twice the salary of the average private sector worker in Maryland ($76,132).

 

 

Question 2: Which federal agencies have the most employees in Maryland?

 

Almost 250 federal agencies and subagencies represented.

 

More than a third of that salary ($5.9 billion / 41%) is for 40,000 employees in the Department of Health and Human Services

 

Department of Commerce has 13,436 employees in Maryland. (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is highest paid. Census Bureau, Patent Office, more).

 

Social Security Administration #3.

 

One reason the average salary is so high is because the National Institutes of Health has its headquarters in Montgomery County. So the top four paid employees in the entire federal workforce are in Maryland, plus another 1,242 NIH employees making $200,000 .

Gary Gibbons $519,000 Director, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. Highest federal salary ever. Increase from $443,000 in 2021. 

 

Question 3: What is the impact going to be on state tax collection?

 

New numbers presented by the state Board of Revenue Estimates show a $343.7 million decrease in expected income tax collections in 2025 and 2026 compared to previous estimates.

 

The big headline has been how is the state going to deal with that when we’re already proposing cuts to erase the budget deficit. But remember: those federal salaries were being paid for by your federal taxes. So the state is in a bit of a tough position, but there will hopefully be net savings for taxpayers as the government begins to downsize.

 

Gov. Moore has said he wants to hire some of the laid off employees to state jobs in Maryland, so we’ll be keeping an eye on that.