Government Employee Retention: What the Data Shows

Your agency is investing in retention, but the turnover hasn't slowed. NEOGOV's 2026 survey of 4,200+ public sector professionals shows where the gap really is. 

Article Highlights

• What's Actually Driving Turnover at Your Agency
• Why Working Conditions Are Driving More Attrition Than Missing Programs
• Manager Capacity Is a Retention Lever Your Agency Is Underusing
• Why Employee Engagement Is Slipping and What It's Costing You
• Building a System-Level Approach to Retention at Your Agency

You’ve expanded wellness benefits, launched recognition programs, put time and effort into workplace culture – even raised salaries if the budget allows. But retaining your government employees is still a struggle.

The impact of high turnover on day-to-day work is real, but up to this point, everything you’ve done to retain employees hasn’t worked. So, what now?

NEOGOV’s 2026 Public Sector HR Trends Report reveals why common retention strategies aren’t working. It comes down to investing in strategies that don’t address the underlying reasons of employee turnover.

In this post, we'll break down what the data shows about why government employees leave, why common retention strategies underperform, and what your agency can do to close the gap between effort and outcome.

Higher Pay, Retirement, and Career Changes: What's Actually Driving Turnover at Your Agency

It’s no surprise the top two reasons why employees leave government agencies are for higher pay and retirement. Compensation structures are hard to change, and while retirements are predictable, they’re not preventable.

It’s not easy to control salary budgets or retirement plans, but you can influence other reasons for turnover, namely career changes, personal reasons, and poor management.

When one in four departing employees point to their manager as the reason why they’re heading for the door, that's something you can act on. Leaving a job due to a career change or personal reasons often reflects a lack of growth opportunities, workload burnout, or work-life balance problems in a current role.

Thankfully, all of these factors are shaped by the systems and working conditions at your agency – which means you can improve them.

Open-text responses in the survey reinforce this: Employees describe being "burned out because we're understaffed" and note that "no amount of engagement fixes workload."

Why Working Conditions at Your Agency Are Driving More Attrition Than Missing Programs

When there aren’t enough people to do the work, your staff takes on higher workloads and more responsibility. As a result, there’s less time to spend on career development. Even the best retention program won’t be effective if your employees don’t have the capacity to engage with it.

Many agencies are struggling with this. Nearly 63% of agencies are operating with persistent staffing shortages, and 40% rate their operational effectiveness as "average" or "poor". Retention strategies that aren’t designed for operational realities simply won’t be successful.

How to Close the Gap Between Retention Programs and Working Conditions

When day-to-day work conditions improve, so does the effectiveness of retention programs. To see real improvement, it’s important to address underlying operational challenges that lead to poor working conditions. Here’s how to start:

• Focus retention resources on high-need areas. Use workforce data to identify departments with the highest vacancy rates, overtime levels, and turnover, instead of spreading your resources thin across the agency.
• Streamline the hiring process to fill open positions faster. Use an applicant tracking system like NEOGOV Insight to automates candidate screening, auto-scoring, and eligibility lists so open seats get filled faster.
• Reduce workloads with automated HR workflows. Paper-based onboarding, time tracking, and forms processing adds to overwork and staffing strain. Leveraging onboarding software, like NEOGOV Onboard, can significantly reduce the administrative burden on your staff and improve public sector onboarding at the same time.
• Audit whether employees can actually access wellness and flexibility programs. If access to programs varies by department or role, they might not be reaching the employees who need them most.

   

Manager Capacity Is a Retention Lever Your Agency Is Underusing

When nearly one in four employees point to poor management as a reason why they leave – it’s time to pay attention. Many agencies acknowledge manager skills need improvement, but it’s not for lack of training. It’s often low capacity that’s leading to poor management.

Over half of public sector agencies say communication is where managers need the most improvement, followed by morale building and coaching and development. But open-text responses to the survey offer a glimpse into the challenges managers face when describing their roles:  

• "increasingly reactive"
• “caught between leadership and staff”
• "too much responsibility without support”

There’s a disconnect between what managers say the problem is and where agencies are focusing their attention. Taking a course to improve communication skills won’t improve role dynamics or provide adequate support – the exact working conditions that prevent managers from leading.

How to Give Managers the Capacity to Lead Proactively

• Automate the admin side of management. Give your managers performance management software so they spend less time on administrative tasks and more time actually managing. NEOGOV Perform provides configurable evaluation templates, automated scheduling, and multi-level approvals which frees up hours of behind-the-scenes paperwork.
• Build real-time employee feedback into daily operations. Performance evaluation tools empower your staff to manage with confidence everyday. Perform's journal entries and check-ins let your managers document coaching conversations, recognize strong work, and address concerns in real time instead of waiting to give feedback during annual reviews.
• Invest only in high-need development skills. Put your resources towards developing the skills your managers need the most. NEOGOV Learn offers leadership development courses alongside compliance training, so manager growth won’t compete with required completions.
• Clarify manager priorities at the leadership level. When your managers are expected to handle operational tasks, administrative processes, and team development at the same time, something will surely fall through the cracks. Work with your managers to define what work they own, and what tasks can be offloaded to systems.

Why Employee Engagement Is Slipping at Your Agency, and What It's Costing You

Employee engagement looks different this year than in years past. Fewer agencies are prioritizing employee engagement and instead focusing on more urgent operational challenges, like efficiency, retention, and employee skill development.

Levels of engagement are also highly variable between departments and teams, and entirely dependent on how the supervisor shapes the employee experience. Employee engagement and retention are tightly linked, so when engagement is inconsistent across departments, retention outcomes are inconsistent and unpredictable. If you notice strong retention in one division and a revolving door in another, take a look at employee engagement and management style.

How to Rebuild Public Sector Engagement When It's Competing with Operational Demands

Improving employee engagement doesn't always mean starting a new program. Sometimes all it takes is connecting the systems you already use to the employee experience.

• Tie training to individual career development. When employees clearly see how training material connects to their own career growth, they're more engaged with the work. Training management software, like Learn, lets your agency assign development courses and connect them to goals in Perform.
• Use performance data to identify disengaged teams before they become retention problems. Look at evaluation scores, goal completion rates, and feedback frequency to see where employee engagement is breaking down across departments.
• Standardize the employee experience across departments. If recognition, feedback cadence, and development pathways depend entirely on which manager an employee reports to, engagement will always be inconsistent. Perform and Learn give your entire agency a common engagement framework to work from.
• Ask employees directly. The report revealed that only 30% of agencies use feedback surveys to improve engagement. Regular, structured feedback from your employees informs which strategies to invest in.

Building a System-Level Approach to Retention at Your Agency

Retention is a complex issue to crack, and it can’t be addressed with wellness benefits or training modules alone. It’s the day-to-day working conditions that influence whether an employee decides to stay or leave.

Take these steps to start addressing the operational challenges impacting your everyday work environment and employee retention:

• Use data to identify where attrition is concentrated. Is it in specific departments, under specific managers, or in specific roles? Recruitment analytics and performance data can help surface these patterns.
• Reduce admin burden on managers so they have more capacity for coaching and development. Automated evaluation workflows, standardized feedback tools, and goal tracking free time that would otherwise go to paperwork.
• Connect training to individual career growth. When employees see a growth path, they're more likely to stay.

NEOGOV provides an integrated platform where recruiting, onboarding, performance management, training, and HR data connect across the full employee lifecycle. When your retention data lives in the same system as your hiring, performance, and training data, you can see the patterns that drive turnover and act on them before your employees leave.

Request a demo of the NEOGOV government HR platform today to see how our purpose-built solutions can support your retention goals.