Methodology

All APS agencies were required to report data for all employees that were employed under s22 and s72 of the Public Service Act 1999 (PS Act) as at the 31 December 2013. Although it was collected, data on trainees and cadets are excluded from the findings in this report. Unless noted in the tables, ongoing and non–ongoing employees are grouped together.

This report covers most staff employed under s22(a), s22(b) and s72 of the PS Act as at 31 December 2013 —employees on leave without pay (LWOP) are excluded. This report excludes Casuals under s22(2)(c), Locally Engaged Employees under the PS Act s74, Agency Heads, and office holders whose remuneration is set by the Remuneration Tribunal.

To ensure that the data received was accurate, data from agencies was checked by APSED staff. Any discrepancies identified were returned to agencies for correction and resubmission. At the conclusion of the cleaning process, a summary of the agency’s data was sent to an SES level employee or Director of HR who certified that their agency’s summary data was accurate. Only then was the dataset finalised.

Data in this report should not be used to calculate past or present populations of the APS. For accurate population data as at December 2013, please refer to the snAPShots data available on the APSC website. For June data, refer to the APS Statistical Bulletin, also produced by the APS Commission.

Part-time employees’ data has been changed to full-time equivalent (FTE) and, for many variables, employees who have worked only part of the year (though active as at 31 December) have had their data annualised. This ensures that each employee’s data has equal weighting.

Employees who started a graduate program in 2013 are shown as a ‘Graduate’, even if they had advanced to an operational classification by 31 December. For the latter employees, remuneration is at their last day as a Graduate.

The columns of the tables may not add up because TRP and TR are calculated separately for each individual employee and it is these values that determine the median. Therefore, the median TR figure will not necessarily be the sum of all median values of the components which make up TR. It will be the median value of TR for all employees.

Data values published in the 2012 APS Remuneration Report have had a small revision and the revised values have been incorporated in this Report. Please note that a very small number of values for data as at December 2012 will not match across the 2012 and the 2013 Reports.

Definitions

The following statistical terms are determined by ordering the data values in ascending order:

Example: values ranging from 1 to 20 inclusive

The tables in this report were prepared using SAS. There are many methods used to determine the median, quartiles and percentiles. Where a data point falls between two values, the method used in this report takes the mean of those two values.

How to read a box plot:

The size of the squares in relation to each other also reveals how evenly distributed the data values are. For example, looking at the Agency bar in the plot above, the lower two squares (P5 to Median) are shorter than the two above (Median to P95). This indicates that there is a smaller range in values for the bottom 45% compared to the top 45%. The APS bar illustrates that the APS data values appear to be more evenly distributed as all four squares appear to be of similar length.

APS agencies

Note: This list reflects the names of APS agencies having employees under the PS Act as at 31 December 2013. Some agencies may have changed name or have been affected by Machinery of Government changes since then.