State Personnel Department seeks raises for hundreds of employees in next budget session

The Indiana State Personnel Department is seeking $151 million in raises for state attorneys, laboratory technicians and other employees whose wages have not kept pace with the market.

Secretary of Management and Budget Lisa Hershman presented the State Budget Committee last week with findings from a new compensation study, which identified 37 state jobs that pay more than 20% below the market.

Those jobs include state attorneys, specialized maintenance technicians, grant coordinators, laboratory technicians and business administrators.

“Salaries need to go up to compete with the rising costs of day-to-day life that our employees are experiencing,” said Matthew Brown, State Personnel Department director.

The study identified another 62 jobs whose wages are 10% to 20% below market, such as construction engineers, maintenance foreman and arson investigators.

Fifty-six jobs align with the market or lag by less than 10%.

Meanwhile, Indiana leads the market in 42 jobs: correctional officers, data scientists, laborers, veterinarians, highway engineers.

Brown said Indiana’s compensation philosophy prioritizes market competitiveness, internal equity, performance and fiscal conditions, but the Personnel Department’s analysis found wage compression is prevalent.

The state updated pay scales in 2022 following a market analysis, which sought to bring salaries to mid-range for similar government and non-profit jobs.

State employees got a 3% cost-of-living raise the following year, but the Personnel Department did not implement the second phase of its plan to alleviate wage compression for mid-level employees.

State employees are now without a pay raise for two consecutive years, though many received one-time bonuses of up to $2,500 this summer.

It’s official — no pay raise for state employees

The result, Brown said, is that more than 80% of state employees are now paid below the midpoint of the state’s established pay scales despite an average of 10 years’ experience.

More than half of state employees remain in the bottom quartile of the pay scale, he said.

“Someone who’s been at the state and in a role for five years is going to make very similar to someone who’s been in the job for one year,” Brown told the State Budget Committee, “and at that point, you lose the ability to distinguish performance-wise or salary-wise based on that experience.”

In one example, Brown said 108 of the 114 state attorneys remain below midpoint of the state’s pay range for attorneys — 60 of those attorneys haven’t made it out of the bottom quartile.

The minimum starting salary for a state attorney is $67,000 and rises to $85,000 after five years, but “that is still significantly below what we would expect” in the private sector, he said.

The raises would not affect minimum and maximum salaries, Brown said, but would instead move employees through pay ranges to better reflect experience. It would amount to a 5% general salary adjustment for a majority of affected state employees.

“If we’re able to start moving folks through those pay ranges, we think we’ll be able to compete better in the marketplace right now, which we’re seeing a lot of struggles with,” he said.

Indiana employs around 30,500 employees statewide, according to the transparency portal.