It's a classic conviction of some civil servants that they could be living the high-life in the private sector, if it weren't for their dedication to public service.
But two professional associations have taken that fantasy and grounded it in reality, releasing a detailed compensation survey for government contractors in the Washington-Baltimore area.
A private sector director of public affairs and government relations in the area made an average of $161,800 in base pay a year in 2005, with a range of $97,500 to $209,000. A deputy general counsel -- the second highest legal position in a company -- made an average of $156,100 last year, in a range of $90,000 to $208,700. And a chief technology officer, one notch below a chief information officer, earned an average of $184,900, in a range of $109,000 to $305,000.
The minimum rate of basic pay for a member of the Senior Executive Service in most federal agencies is $109,808, and the maximum is $165,200.
The 400-page document on contractor salaries, published this month by the Human Resource Association and the Professional Services Council, offers statistics on basic pay, raises, ranges and new hire rates for hundreds of job categories. Each one is accompanied by a detailed description, and the groups encourage employees to read them closely in matching up their jobs.
The survey also offers some aggregate statistics of interest. Salaries for executive level jobs for contractors were on average 61.3 percent higher than those for their federal employee counterparts.
"We are able to see salary changes that reflect an expanding contractor workforce at increasingly sophisticated levels to support increasingly sophisticated government customers," said Alan Chvotkin, senior vice president and counsel for PSC.
In 2005, the average pay raise for government contractors in the Washington-Baltimore area was 4.5 percent. Those raises included merit increases, general increases, cost-of-living adjustments and market adjustments. In 2005, federal workers got a 3.5 percent raise, but that does not include promotions or step increases.
And, drilling down a level, 59 job categories in the private sector declined in pay while 169 increased.
Forty-one percent of contractors in the study paid a signing bonus to some new employees, to the tune of about $4,500 on average. Employees who received the signing bonus were usually making more than $50,000 to start.
Here's an incentive that doesn't exist in the federal sector: referral bonuses. About 70 percent of the companies in the survey said they give cash to employees who successfully refer someone for a job. The referral bonus range was from about $900 to $2,300.
The survey also included some data on compensation for workers with security clearances. Forty-seven percent of employers said they pay more to employees with a security clearance. Usually, this means a reported 13 percent to 22 percent higher base pay at all security clearance levels.
This is the third year that the HRA's National Capital Area chapter and the PSC have published a compensation survey expressly for government contractors in the Washington-Baltimore area. The results are available to companies for a few hundred dollars, depending on company size. They can be purchased at www.hra-nca.org.