Federal agencies spent nearly $10 billion in 2025 placing more than 100,000 employees on paid administrative leave, a sixfold increase from 2023 that was driven largely by the Trump administration’s deferred resignation program, a Government Accountability Office review found. The program paid employees to stay home in exchange for resigning by September 2025, or by December for workers eligible to retire. About $6.7 billion, or roughly 70% of the total, went to employees who participated in the program, according to Defense One.
The increase was reflected in the amount of leave used and the number of employees taking it. Federal employees used 4 million workdays of paid administrative leave in 2023 and 4.4 million in 2024. In 2025, usage reached 21.6 million workdays. The 2025 total was about five times the 2024 level, while spending was six times the amount recorded two years earlier.
Paid administrative leave usage peaked in July 2025 at nearly 3 million workdays. Approximately 2.5 million of those workdays were associated with the deferred resignation program, GAO said. The program accounted for most of the leave recorded during that month.
The number of employees taking more than 90 workdays of paid administrative leave also rose sharply. Fewer than 600 federal employees took more than 90 workdays of leave in each of 2023 and 2024. In 2025, almost 100,000 employees took more than 90 days.
The deferred resignation program followed the Office of Personnel Management’s issuance of regulations implementing the 2016 Administrative Leave Act. The law was intended to curb the use of paid administrative leave. OPM told agencies that the regulations would not take effect until September 2025 and later proposed a rule recognizing workforce realignment as a valid use of paid leave. OPM’s current guidance for agencies considering a deferred resignation program sets a 12-week cap on paid administrative leave.
GAO said its estimates for leave connected to the deferred resignation program and other workforce-restructuring efforts are likely a modest overcount. Employees sometimes record other forms of paid time off, including federal holidays or doctor’s appointments, in ways that cause them to appear in the leave data. OPM also had not created a dedicated leave category for absences associated with workforce restructuring.
The report said those data problems prevent policymakers from determining whether the administration’s workforce reductions are reducing the cost of government. OPM Director Scott Kupor has previously said the deferred resignation program would save taxpayers $20 billion each year. GAO said officials need an accurate accounting of paid administrative leave costs to determine how much of a government-wide savings goal is being achieved.
GAO wrote, “[Without] an accurate understanding of how much paid administrative leave costs the federal government, there is no way to accurately determine to what extent the government-wide cost-savings goal is being met.”
GAO recommended that OPM acknowledge the reliability problems in its public-facing paid-leave data and establish a new payroll category for leave connected to workforce reductions. OPM had said it had no plans to create such a subcategory, but its response to the review changed that position.
Kupor wrote that OPM would begin developing a dedicated paid administrative leave category in coordination with agencies and payroll service providers. The agency said the category would support more timely reporting on the use of workforce-reduction leave and simplify future analysis.
The proposed category would distinguish leave connected to workforce-reduction efforts from other paid administrative leave in federal payroll systems. Until it is developed, GAO’s review identifies limitations in the data used to calculate the nearly $10 billion cost and assess the government-wide savings associated with the deferred resignation program.