As the number of officials employed by state departments grows well beyond half a million, senior government figures have suggested that headway is still being made via tech and data

The civil service’s full-time equivalent headcount has risen to 520,000, according to the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics.

But, while the Whitehall workforce has stretched to its biggest size in almost two decades, ministers have stressed that digital transformation is continuing to enable government’s targeted efficiencies.

The latest public sector data set, published this month, shows the full-time equivalent headcount has increased from 517,000 in June 2025 to 520,000 in September 2025. This is the highest FTE headcount since March 2006.

The numbers include officials working for the Welsh Government, the Scottish Government and temporary staff. An “all staff” crunch of the figures, not adjusted for FTEs, shows civil service headcount hit 554,000 in the second quarter of the year. 

The civil service’s ranks have increased every year since 2016 following the coalition government’s austerity-driven attempts to rein in numbers. Since then, growth has been driven by the demands of the UK’s decision to leave the EU and the need to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic, while various drives to reduce the overall size of the civil service have failed.

FTE headcount was 384,000 in September 2016 – meaning it has increased by 35% in nine years. The latest FTE headcount is still below the high of 534,000 reached in 2004, when Tony Blair was prime minister. It has continued – albeit slowly – to rise in Labour’s first 15 months in government, going from 513,000 in June 2024 to 520,000 in September 2025.

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Darren Jones, who is chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and chief secretary to the prime minister, explained to MPs why the total numbers are continuing to rise despite the government’s focus on getting departments to make efficiency savings.

“There is difference between administrative budgets, as in policy and central departmental officials compared to programme delivery, which might be running a job centre or a prison or a hospital,” he said. “So the reason we focused on admin budgets was because we don’t want to cut frontline capacity for public users but we want to ensure we’re being as efficient as possible in the back end, which is partly around digital transformation, how we structure ourselves in government, but there are some implications where it has impact on the total number. So, we’ve had to hire additional officials into HMRC and DWP to tackle fraud and error, which is why you see a growth in some of those areas compared to efficiency gains in other parts of the civil service.”

A breakdown of the quarterly FTE figures provided by the ONS showed that HM Revenue and Customs increased its headcount by the most between June and September, adding 1,060 permanent staff and 130 temporary staff over the period.

At the other end of the scale, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs saw its FTE headcount decrease by 280 over the three-month period, with most of this reduction coming from permanent staff.

At the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee session, Cat Little, the Cabinet Office permanent secretary and civil service chief operating officer, revealed that 5,000 civil servants are expected to leave by March under 36 different voluntary exit schemes across government. She also said the government would likely publish the civil service strategic workforce plans in around three-to-six months, which would include plans for departmental headcount reductions.