Last Updated: September 16, 2026 Reading Time: 6 min

The deferred resignation program was sold as a way to shrink the workforce cheaply. A new Government Accountability Office report puts a price on the "cheaply" part. GAO estimates the agencies it reviewed spent $9.5 billion in salary on paid administrative leave in 2025, six times what they spent in 2023, and GAO traces about $6.7 billion of it to employees who had agreed to leave and were paid through September 30, 2025 without working.

What GAO Counted

GAO-26-108477, released September 15, 2026, is titled "Federal Workforce: Deferred Resignation Program Largely Responsible for Sixfold Increase in Paid Administrative Leave Salary Costs." The headline finding, in GAO's words: "GAO estimates federal agencies in our review spent $9.5 billion in salary costs on paid administrative leave in 2025, a sixfold increase from 2023."

Three limits on that number, all stated by GAO:

  • It is salary only. Health insurance, retirement contributions, and other benefits paid during the leave are not in it.
  • It covers the agencies in GAO's review, not every agency in government.
  • It is an estimate built on payroll data GAO itself found unreliable in places (more on that below).

The deferred resignation share came from a different method. GAO says that "using program assumptions and internal time and attendance data provided by payroll service providers, GAO calculated about $6.7 billion of that amount was associated with deferred resignation program." Roughly seven of every ten administrative-leave dollars in 2025 were the DRP.

Why the Deferred Resignation Program Shows Up Here

Administrative leave is an excused absence with pay that does not draw down your annual or sick leave. Agencies use it for short excused absences such as a building closure; weather and safety leave and investigative leave now run under their own separate authorities, described below.

In 2025 OPM used it for something else. As GAO summarizes, OPM "let employees who agreed to resign or retire stop working immediately but receive pay through September 30, 2025." Those months of pay had to be coded somewhere in the payroll system, and administrative leave was the bucket. That is how a workforce-reduction program became a $6.7 billion administrative-leave expense.

GAO's payroll review found the volume of administrative leave "increased by 435 percent from 2023 to 2025." The dollar total rose faster than the volume: sixfold versus 435 percent. GAO does not say why.

FedTools Estimate: What It Cost Per Participant

GAO does not publish a per-person figure, but it does publish the matching denominator: "about 144,312 employees from the agencies in our analysis reported paid administrative leave for this purpose." FedTools divided GAO's $6.7 billion by GAO's own 144,312. Treat this as a FedTools estimate built from two GAO figures for the same population, not a GAO number. Our earlier cost-per-employee analysis divides Public Citizen's larger salary-plus-benefits estimate by a different count (GAO's 129,000 separations across 22 agencies), so its per-person figure is not comparable to the GAO-only calculation below.

Input Value Source
DRP-associated administrative leave, 2025 $6.7 billion GAO-26-108477
Employees who reported DRP administrative leave (GAO's analyzed agencies) ~144,312 GAO-26-108477
Leave cost per participant about $46,000 FedTools estimate: $6.7B ÷ 144,312

Method: single division, rounded once to the nearest thousand; both figures are GAO estimates for the same set of reviewed agencies. The point of the estimate is scale: roughly $46,000 in leave salary per participant, before benefits or the cost of backfilling the job.

The Data Problem GAO Flagged

The most useful part of the report for anyone who reads federal payroll numbers is the caveat. GAO found "issues with the leave data that agencies reported to OPM," and gives an example: holiday leave being reported as paid administrative leave.

The evidence was in the calendar. GAO "found that agencies reported 144 percent more paid administrative leave used in pay periods with a public holiday in 2023 through early 2025." Federal holidays are their own leave category. When administrative leave spikes in pay periods that contain a holiday, the pattern suggests some agencies may be coding the holiday as administrative leave.

GAO's complaint is that "OPM doesn't disclose all its data issues." A reader of OPM's published leave data has no way to know which figures carry known problems.

What GAO Wants OPM to Do

Two recommendations, quoted in full:

  1. "The Director of OPM should publicly disclose data reliability issues that remain unaddressed to improve transparency."
  2. "The Director of OPM, in coordination with agencies and payroll service providers, should create a new category of paid administrative leave in the Enterprise Human Resources Integration payroll data system for agencies to report paid administrative leave used to support workforce reduction efforts."

The second one matters for the next round of any separation program. Two payroll providers created internal codes for DRP leave, but GAO found that "these data are automatically combined into the general administrative leave category when transmitted to OPM." A standardized category would preserve that distinction in the data OPM publishes.

What This Means for You

If you are a current employee, the report itself changes no leave entitlement. Weather and safety leave and investigative or notice leave run under their own authorities, and your agency's policy governs them.

If your agency is running or planning a separation program, the amount of paid leave a new agreement carries is set by OPM's guidance and your agency's terms, and it has been tightening. Our September 30 deadlines post tracks the dates we could verify. Whether the GAO report changes future terms is a policy question it will feed.

If you are weighing an offer, the GAO figure shows what the paid-leave period is worth. In the 2025 program, full salary through September 30, 2025 with benefits continued was the core of the package.

Put Your Own Salary Next to the Number

Use our free GS Pay Calculator to see your 2026 annual salary for your grade, step, and locality. Half of it is a rough current-rate illustration of six months of administrative leave; the value of a 2025 agreement depends on its actual dates and 2025 pay rates. Try it now →

Frequently Asked Questions

How much did the government spend on paid administrative leave in 2025?

GAO estimates the agencies in its review spent $9.5 billion in salary costs on paid administrative leave in 2025, a sixfold increase from 2023. The figure covers salary only, not benefits, and only the agencies GAO examined.

How much of that was the deferred resignation program?

About $6.7 billion, according to GAO. The 2025 deferred resignation program let employees who agreed to resign or retire stop working immediately while drawing full pay through September 30, 2025. That paid time was booked as administrative leave.

What is paid administrative leave?

It is an excused absence with pay that is not charged to annual or sick leave. GAO describes it as a cost to taxpayers because the employee receives full pay without performing job duties. Agencies use it for short excused absences (weather and safety leave and investigative leave have their own separate authorities) and, in 2025, to park employees who had accepted deferred resignation.

Are the GAO numbers exact?

No, and GAO says so. It found agencies reported 144 percent more administrative leave in pay periods that contained a federal holiday, a sign that holiday time was being miscoded as administrative leave. GAO recommended that OPM publicly disclose the data problems it has not fixed.

What did GAO recommend?

Two things. OPM should publicly disclose the data reliability issues that remain unaddressed, and OPM, with agencies and payroll providers, should create a new payroll category so administrative leave used for workforce reductions is reported separately from ordinary administrative leave.

Does this change the rules for administrative leave going forward?

Not by itself. GAO reports recommend, they do not legislate. Any change to how much paid leave a separation agreement carries comes from OPM guidance and agency terms, not from this report.

Sources