Overview
The New York City government employs a workforce of more than 280,000 full-time employees. These include those positions often thought of—such as teachers and principals in the City’s public schools, sanitation workers, police officers, and firefighters—as well other critical workers including public benefit coordinators, city planners, child protective specialists, and building inspectors.
Following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the size of the City’s full-time workforce began to decline considerably from a pre-pandemic record high, and the City has since struggled to retain and recruit employees. This resulted in historically high numbers of vacant positions over the past several years—positions that are authorized in the City budget, but unfilled. The Comptroller’s Office has highlighted this trend and the deleterious impact it has had on the provision of services.
While the number of actual full-time City employees has increased somewhat from the drop following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, additional work remains for the City to recruit and retain the diverse talent needed to effectively deliver services.
The Comptroller’s NYC Agency Staffing Dashboard, which will be updated monthly, presents data on the number of actual full-time City employees, as well as the number of full-time positions that City agencies are authorized to hire since the beginning of FY 2017. It includes data on all Mayor and non-Mayoral agencies, but excludes staff at separate but related agencies, such as the New York City Housing Authority and NYC Health + Hospitals. Data on full-time equivalent positions or FTEs are also excluded.
This dashboard allows the public to access to up-to-date information on City staffing by agency. This greater transparency will equip a variety of users, from agency administrators to advocates to the average New Yorker, with actionable intelligence and transparent information about the strength of the City’s workforce.
Data Definitions and Sources
Data Definitions
Actual Employees: Actual active workforce as of a particular fiscal year and month and are often referred to as the City’s actual headcount. These are published by the Mayor’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and are considered official results.
Authorized Positions: The number of positions that an agency is authorized to fill. The number of positions filled at any time during the year will vary from the authorized headcount because of employee terminations, the hiring process and other reasons. Authorized positions are also referred to as authorized or planned headcount. Changes to the number of authorized positions are published with each financial plan update.
Attrition: The natural reduction of employees from a payroll through resignation, retirements, deaths and transfers.
Employee Category: One of three main classes of employees that compose the City’s workforce. They are pedagogical, such as teachers, principals, and professors; civilian, such as caseworkers, community associates, and administrative positions; and uniform positions such as firefighters, police and correction officers, and sanitation workers.
Fiscal Year (FY): The period of twelve months which begins July 1 and ends the following June 30.
Full-Time Positions: Employment in which a person works a specified minimum number of hours in a workweek (i.e. most full-time employees work 35 hours a week).
Funding: Positions can be funded either through City revenues, denoted as CITY, or from federal, state, or other funding sources, denoted as NON-CITY.
Preliminary Actual Employees: The number of actual employees derived from initial payroll results and have not yet been published by OMB. Data on the preliminary actual employees by funding source is not available.
Vacancy: A position that is authorized to be hired but is unfilled.
Vacancy Rate: The number of vacancies against the number of authorized positions.
Data Sources
The number of full-time authorized positions are published by the Mayor’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in the Full-Time and Full-Time Equivalent Staffing Levels Report, published on their website. These are updated with the release of each financial plan. The values are assigned to specific months – July through October are assigned the Adopted Plan value, November and December are the November Plan value, January through March are the Preliminary Plan value, April through May are the Executive Plan value, and June is the final June Plan value.
The number of full-time actual employees is provided by OMB in their Actual Full-Time Headcount report and is depicted in the Dashboard. Preliminary actual employees are derived from initial payroll results and are intended to show current trends in the City’s actual workforce.