Government Stopped Hiring And Kept Paying. That Is The Part Aimed At Your Payroll.

Public sector hiring has slowed and it does not let your wage bill off. Government employee jobs rose 2.3 per cent in the year to June 2026, the slowest since 2019-20, while the public sector wage bill rose 6.6 per cent to $266.1 billion. Both figures are from the Australian Bureau of Statistics this morning. Government has stopped adding people at the rate it did. It has not stopped paying more for them.

Outstaffer sells employment and publishes what it charges, so read this knowing that.

Government hiring slowed to its weakest rate since 2019-20

There were 2,657,400 public sector employee jobs in June 2026, up 60,300. The ABS calls that 2.3 per cent rise the slowest since the onset of the pandemic. Commonwealth jobs grew 1.0 per cent, down from 5.5 per cent. Local government grew 0.6 per cent.

Read only that and you would think the public sector had stepped out of your way.

Am I competing with government for the same hires?

Yes, and the contest has moved from headcount to pay. The wage bill grew close to three times as fast as the job count, so what is expanding is what government pays rather than how many it employs. Commonwealth wages grew 7.2 per cent against that 1.0 per cent of jobs, seven times the rate.

The wage bill did not slow with the hiring

Total cash wages and salaries rose $16.5 billion. The rate did ease, from 7.8 per cent to 6.6 per cent, and that moderation is the headline the ABS led with.

It is still 6.6 per cent, in the market where you are setting next year’s offers.

State and territory governments account for almost all of it: 91.6 per cent of the job growth and 76.2 per cent of the wage growth. The competitor is not Canberra. It is your own state.

Where the competition for hires is concentrated

Which industries took the new jobs?

Health care and social assistance took 29,700 of the 60,300, just under half, and its wage bill rose 8.5 per cent, about twice its own headcount growth and the fastest of the three big public industries. Education and training added 17,400. Public administration and safety, which is what most people picture, added 4,600.

Health and education between them took roughly four in five of the new jobs.

Then the geography. Queensland’s state government alone added 19,700, about a third of all public sector job growth in the country. If you run a clinic or an allied health business in Brisbane, your recruitment problem has a specific cause. It is the health department down the road, paying more, in your postcode, for your candidate.

The admin hours underneath that are the ones a practice rarely counts.

This release cannot tell you what a public job pays

The honest limit is the ABS’s own. The release warns against dividing wages by jobs to get an average, because the wage figure covers the whole financial year and the job count is a single June snapshot. A wage bill rising 8.5 per cent is therefore not evidence of an 8.5 per cent pay rise. It is more people, paid more, in proportions this release cannot separate.

A filled job is also not a vacancy. Some of that 60,300 is competition you have already lost.

The figures are firmer than most labour data: they come from Single Touch Payroll records rather than a survey, so they are what employers reported to the tax office.

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Price the offer against the bidder, not the average

Work out which of your roles sit inside health, education or public administration, then look up what your own state government pays for them. That is the floor you are bidding against, and what an hour of work produced this year tells you the rest once you have it.

Where you cannot match it, the question stops being whether you are competing with government for the same hires and becomes which seats have to come from that pool at all. Admin, bookkeeping, claims and scheduling usually do not. Run one of those as a properly employed offshore hire and you are out of the auction.

So which of your open roles is a state government also advertising this week?