Compliance Inspection and Support

What the Numbers Say About Compliance Inspection and Support

2.6% of the federal civilian workforce (2,289,472 employees total, March 2025) works in the Compliance Inspection and Support occupation (OPM code 1802): 59,027 people, headcount up 3.5% versus the prior period, a workforce-scale shift government watchers track closely, since swings this large move federal staffing totals meaningfully.

Compliance Inspection and Support pays $66,788 per year on average, 39.2% below the $109,869 federal civilian average, after moving up 1.7% from the prior period (a modest shift, consistent with routine locality pay and grade-level movement). Employees in this role stay an average of 8.3 years, a mid-length average tenure, reflecting a mix of career employees and those who transfer or exit mid-career.

The Investigation Group family (code 18) groups Compliance Inspection and Support together with 19 other related occupations across the federal government. Candidates browsing USAJOBS for Compliance Inspection and Support postings should also review these sibling occupations, since federal hiring managers often cross-post positions across closely related codes when recruitment is difficult. All figures here come directly from OPM FedScope Employment Cubes, the same official source referenced in federal workforce planning, budget justifications, and GAO reports.

Within the Investigation Group family, Compliance Inspection and Support is the single largest occupation by headcount, accounting for 27.9% of the family's combined 211,925 employees.

Compliance Inspection and Support is one of just 5 federal occupation series with 50,000 or more employees, out of 634 tracked in OPM FedScope for the March 2025 reporting window -- a scale that makes it a defining occupation for how the Investigation Group family is staffed federal-wide, with an average salary that ranks in the bottom half (10th percentile) of pay among Investigation Group occupations. Within the family, the largest occupations by headcount are Compliance Inspection and Support at 59,027, Criminal Investigation at 43,968, and General Inspection, Investigation, Enforcement, and Compliance Series at 42,403, ahead of 17 smaller occupations in the same family. Together, these top 3 occupations account for 68.6% of the Investigation Group family's 211,925 total employees. Nationally, Compliance Inspection and Support's average salary of $66,788 sits at the 25th percentile among all 634 federal occupation series tracked in FedScope, below the federal-wide median for occupation-level average pay -- headcount and pay rank independently of each other, so a large occupation series is not guaranteed to also rank high on the pay scale. Among this same group of 5 occupation series at 50,000-plus employees, headcount changed by an average of 0.5% from the prior period, versus Compliance Inspection and Support's own 3.5% increase. Average tenure across these 5 large occupation series runs 11.7 years; Compliance Inspection and Support's own 8.3-year average is shorter than that peer-group average.