All permanent, civilian, career federal employees from executive, legislative and judicial branch agencies are eligible to participate in the survey. This includes civilian employees from the Intelligence Community, the Defense Department and its components, as well as uniformed members of commissioned corps. Federal contractors are not eligible to participate.

All federal employees interested in participating in the Public Service Viewpoint Survey can access the survey here. Several partner organizations will also share the survey link with their federal employee members.  

Please complete the survey outside of your normal working hours. Respondents must first complete a series of screening questions at the start of the survey to determine eligibility. We will filter out responses that do not meet the eligibility requirements, so completion does not guarantee your response will be included in our final sample. Read more about our eligibility requirements here.

We want the 2025 Public Service Viewpoint Survey to be as comparable as possible with past federal employee surveys like the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey. To do so, we are mirroring the participation rules used by OPM and other agencies as closely as possible. While we understand that this may frustrate those who recently left the federal workforce, federal agencies only include current federal employees in their surveys. 

While not a perfect substitution for an employee experience or exit survey, several storytelling projects collect information on the experiences of employees who recently departed federal service. The Partnership is supporting one such initiative, the POPVOX Foundation’s Departure Dialogues Project.

People who did not complete the survey should be able to open the link again, although you may have to use a different browser or device if you encounter any issues. If you experienced a technical issue that forced you to leave the survey after completing the verification page (i.e., Page 2 of the survey), then please use the same personal email address. 

If you encounter any problems while taking the survey, please reach out to us at PSVS@ourpublicservice.org.

The Partnership is committed to protecting the confidentiality of respondents to the Public Service Viewpoint Survey. Any personally identifiable information or demographic data shared with us will be restricted to the Partnership’s data team and only be used in the survey administration and analysis process. We ask only the most essential demographic and screening questions required to properly weight survey responses and confirm respondent eligibility. Response data will be kept secure and encrypted. 

To maintain your confidentiality, all survey findings shared by the Partnership will be anonymized in a way that will prevent you or your responses from being identified. Following the Office of Personnel Management’s approach, data for demographic groups with less than 30 respondents will not be shared outside the Partnership.

We strongly encourage respondents to complete the survey outside of official work hours and on nonwork devices. Additionally, we discourage respondents from sharing information about the survey through official agency channels such as work email addresses.

All response data will be kept secure and encrypted. Any personally identifiable information or demographic data shared with us will be restricted to the Partnership’s data team and only be used for survey administration and analysis. While we ask for a personal email as a part of the verification process, it will not be used to contact respondents for any reason and will be deleted upon completing the data cleaning process.

In addition to protecting data about you, all survey findings shared by the Partnership will be anonymized in a way that will prevent you or your responses from being identified. We are only asking the most essential demographic and screening questions required to confirm eligibility and weight responses. Following the Office of Personnel Management’s approach, data for demographic groups with less than 30 respondents will not be shared outside the Partnership. Agencies will not have access to privileged reports with any more details than those shared with the public.

We are not asking respondents for their work emails, and we strongly discourage sharing them with us. We do ask for a personal email as a part of the survey, but it will not be used for contacting or marketing to participants, and it will not be shared with any partner organizations. We are also restricting access to all personally identifiable information related to the survey, like emails to the Partnership’s data team. 

These email addresses are being collected to identify duplicate survey submissions and verify that responses are legitimate. After the survey closes, we will use a subset of the respondents’ emails and publicly available information to verify that individuals in our subset are people who meet our qualifications. This information will increase our confidence in the validity of the sample. Once that process is completed, all email addresses will be deleted. 

We plan to close the survey at 11:59 p.m. EST on Dec. 19, 2025.

The Public Service Viewpoint Survey enables career federal employees to share their perspectives on their workplace, work unit, supervisor, organization and leadership with government leaders, policymakers and the public. The Partnership will determine how to best publicly share these perspectives captured in the survey once we have fully analyzed the results and carried out weighting and diagnostic checks.  

Whatever method the Partnership uses to share the results of the survey, all findings shared by the Partnership will be anonymized in a way that will prevent individual federal employees from being identified and data for demographics groups with less than 30 respondents will not be shared outside of the Partnership.

We are engaging with a wide range of unions and management associations, such as the American Federation of Government Employees, the Federal Managers Association, the National Federation of Federal Employees and the National Treasury Employees Union, among others. Their partnership is crucial for reaching the more than 2 million civilian federal workers.    

We welcome collaborating with other organizations to ensure our survey reaches as many eligible federal employees as possible. We are also making our survey accessible to the public through other channels, such as our website, newsletters and social media. If you are interested in partnering with us, please email psvs@ourpublicservice.org. 

The cancellation of the 2025 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey and many other personnel surveys across the government creates the first major gap in the annual collection of federal employee engagement data since 2009. It is critical for government leaders, policymakers and the public to understand the impact of significant changes on the federal workforce.  

It is also important to note that a stated goal behind many policy and workforce changes is to increase the efficiency and productivity of the federal civil service. Significant research, including our own, shows an engaged workforce is more productive and provides better services to the public. Therefore, it is important to maintain both engagement and productivity metrics to demonstrate the impact of current management practices across federal agencies.

The survey seeks to capture federal employees’ experiences across the entire year, not just during the shutdown. The survey administration period was delayed due to the shutdown, but the start date of Nov. 10, 2025, was determined by factors independent of the government’s status. 

Work on creating the Public Service Viewpoint Survey began in mid-August, after the cancellation of the 2025 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey was announced. We originally intended to release the survey two months later, in mid-October. However, when the federal government shut down on Oct. 1, 2025, we decided to delay the start of the survey to Nov. 10. This was the latest we could hold the survey without having its window extend into the holiday season in December. 

We have included a question about the respondent’s work status during the shutdown to capture any observable differences between employees who were required to work without pay (i.e., employees with an excepted status), those who were furloughed, and those whose work and pay continued despite the shutdown (i.e., employees with an exempt status). 

The Office of Personnel Management has administered the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey and its predecessor, the Federal Human Capital Survey, since 2002. Many agencies have used this survey to fulfill a legal requirement that all executive branch agencies conduct surveys of their workforce. Several executive and legislative branch agencies have also conducted their own annual employee surveys, such as NASA, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Government Accountability Office and the Intelligence Community. 

While the Partnership has relied on the viewpoint survey to produce the Best Places to Work in the Federal Government® rankings for over 20 years, we are a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization, not a part of the U.S. government. 

To maximize the usefulness and generalizability of the Public Service Viewpoint Survey, we replicated the design and methodology of the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey wherever possible. However, because we are an independent third-party organization without access to federal personnel files, our ability to do this was limited in a few areas. 

Sample Design 

In recent years, the Office of Personnel Management has administered the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey as a government-wide census open to nearly all permanent executive branch employees, both full time and part time. However, we do not have access to OPM’s federal employee roster. So, we are conducting outreach through both our partner organizations and our own communications to invite employees to participate. To verify eligibility and protect the validity of the sample, all respondents will be asked to complete a short series of screening questions at the start of the survey to confirm they are current federal employees. This screening will include a personal email that will only be used to validate responses and make duplicates easier to identify. We will also screen responses using industry-standard techniques that identify digital or human actors attempting to impersonate legitimate respondents. 

Weighting 

To ensure the survey results are as representative as possible, we are modeling our weighting approach based on OPM’s methods. OPM, with access to complete personnel records and the ability to draw a probability sample of all eligible employees, can calculate base weights to reflect selection probabilities, adjust for nonresponse bias, and then apply a procedure known as raking to align weighted responses with known workforce distributions by sex, subcomponent and minority status—both within agencies and across government. For more details, see OPM’s most recent FEVS technical report. 

Employees are primarily learning about the Public Service Viewpoint Survey through partner and public communications instead of direct communication, so not every eligible employee has a known or equal chance of selection. As such, we cannot calculate base weights or perform nonresponse adjustments. Instead, we will apply a robust raking procedure using the same variables as the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey, with the additions of bargaining unit and supervisory status to help account for the potential overrepresentation of nonsupervisory union members in our sample. 

Survey Design 

The Public Service Viewpoint Survey asks questions that address many of the same themes as the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey but uses a smaller set of items to reduce the time and burden of completion. Our survey emphasizes core questions on workplace experience and satisfaction, with a few additional items that reflect priorities in the current environment. 

Because of these design differences, we will wait until the results have been fully analyzed before making any judgments about their comparability to past Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey findings.

Information about the 2024 Best Places to Work in the Federal Government® rankings and results from earlier rankings can be found here.

The results of the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey have largely informed our annual Best Places to Work in the Federal Government® rankings. Since the viewpoint survey and other federal employee surveys have been canceled for 2025, we decided to create and independently conduct our own survey of the federal workforce in the fall of 2025, titled the Public Service Viewpoint Survey.  

The Partnership hopes to produce the 2025 Best Places to Work rankings with the data from this new survey, but we will determine our ability to do so once we fully analyze the Public Service Viewpoint Survey results and carry out weighting and diagnostic checks. 

For media inquiries related to the Public Service Viewpoint Survey or the Best Places to Work in the Federal Government® rankings, please reach out to press@ourpublicservice.org.  

For more general information on the Public Service Viewpoint Survey and the 2025 Best Places to Work rankings, please reach out to psvs@ourpublicservice.org.  

If you have any questions related to how we conducted the Best Places to Work rankings before 2025, or the rankings’ methodology, consult our Best Places to Work Frequently Asked Questions and Methodology pages. If you cannot find the answer to your question, email bptw@ourpublicservice.org.