More Than 15,000 Federal Employees Make at Least $200K

Most of the discussion of pay for federal employees in recent months and years has been about insufficient or non-existent raises, pay gaps and budget shortfalls.

Not all feds are making out so poorly, however.

A new database compiled by FedSmith.com , using data from the Office of Personnel Management and other agencies, shows more than 15,000 federal employees earned at least $200,000 in 2013. That’s roughly 1 percent of all federal workers on the list; some employees in national security positions were not included in the database.

The vast majority of the top 1 percent of feds were doctors at the Veterans Affairs Department. The highest earning employee was a Veterans Health Administration doctor in Pittsburgh, who took in just more than $400,000 last year. More than 1,200 employees made more than $300,000.

Other agencies that require a highly specialized workforce paid several employees at least $200,000, including the National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Food and Drug Administration, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Financial Housing Finance Agency, and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

All of these employees are paid on systems specific to their agency or occupation. Some of these systems have much higher pay caps than the General Schedule, which sets the salaries for the vast majority of federal employees and capped annual pay -- before adjusting for locality -- at just less than $130,000.

Even members of the Senior Executive Service have their pay capped at $181,500 for 2014. The highest paid feds on the Executive Schedule, such as agency heads and the vice president, will earn $201,700. Deputy heads will receive less than $200,000.

This pie chart breaks down the percentage of employees on each of the federal pay scales, according to the latest data from OPM: