Miscellaneous Administration and Program

What the Numbers Say About Miscellaneous Administration and Program

Federal agencies employ 111,646 people in the Miscellaneous Administration and Program occupation (OPM code 301), accounting for 4.9% of the total federal civilian workforce of 2,289,472 for the March 2025 reporting window. Headcount in this occupation moved down by -1.5% versus the prior period, a workforce-scale shift government watchers track closely, since swings this large move federal staffing totals meaningfully.

Average tenure in Miscellaneous Administration and Program runs 13.5 years, a mid-length average tenure, reflecting a mix of career employees and those who transfer or exit mid-career. Pay averages $116,121 per year, 5.7% above the $109,869 federal civilian average and up 0.5% from the prior period, a modest shift, consistent with routine locality pay and grade-level movement.

Miscellaneous Administration and Program sits inside the General Administrative, Clerical, and Office Services Group family (code 3), which contains 28 related occupations across the federal government. Candidates browsing USAJOBS for Miscellaneous Administration and Program 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.

Inside the General Administrative, Clerical, and Office Services Group family (28 occupations, 339,466 employees combined), Miscellaneous Administration and Program holds the #1 spot by headcount, a 32.9% share of the family total.

Miscellaneous Administration and Program 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 General Administrative, Clerical, and Office Services Group family is staffed federal-wide, with an average salary that ranks in the top half (75th percentile) of pay among General Administrative, Clerical, and Office Services Group occupations. Within the family, the largest occupations by headcount are Miscellaneous Administration and Program at 111,646, Management and Program Analysis at 97,742, and Miscellaneous Clerk and Assistant at 45,351, ahead of 25 smaller occupations in the same family. Together, these top 3 occupations account for 75.0% of the General Administrative, Clerical, and Office Services Group family's 339,466 total employees. Nationally, Miscellaneous Administration and Program's average salary of $116,121 sits at the 73rd percentile among all 634 federal occupation series tracked in FedScope, above 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 Miscellaneous Administration and Program's own 1.5% decrease. Average tenure across these 5 large occupation series runs 11.7 years; Miscellaneous Administration and Program's own 13.5-year average is longer than that peer-group average.