Compliance Inspection and Support

FedScope read on Compliance Inspection and Support (dense series)

2.7% of the federal civilian workforce (1,953,300 employees total, June 2026) works in the Compliance Inspection and Support occupation (OPM code 1802): 53,444 people, headcount down -0.8% 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 n/a per year on average, moving down 0.0% from the prior period (a small shift, within the range of normal year-to-year rounding rather than a broad pay-table change). Employees in this role stay an average of 9.8 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 in the Investigation Group family.

Within the Investigation Group family, Compliance Inspection and Support is the single largest occupation by headcount, accounting for 25.5% of the family's combined 209,389 employees.

Compliance Inspection and Support is one of just 5 federal occupation series with 50,000 or more employees, out of 541 tracked in OPM FedScope for the June 2026 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 (0th percentile) of pay among Investigation Group occupations. Within the family, the largest occupations by headcount are Compliance Inspection and Support at 53,444, Criminal Investigation at 44,633, and General Inspection, Investigation, Enforcement, and Compliance Series at 44,491, ahead of 17 smaller occupations in the same family. Together, these top 3 occupations account for 68.1% of the Investigation Group family's 209,389 total employees. Nationally, Compliance Inspection and Support's average salary of n/a sits at the 0th percentile among all 541 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 -4.0% from the prior period, versus Compliance Inspection and Support's own 0.8% decrease. Average tenure across these 5 large occupation series runs 13.5 years; Compliance Inspection and Support's own 9.8-year average is shorter than that peer-group average.