Guernsey · The Size of the State · 2015–2025

The States’ pay bill, against RPI.

Core-government payroll rose 64.3% over the decade against 42.9% inflation — but the excess is headcount, not pay per head.

Axis starts at £150m, not zero

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The dashed lines are not a forecast: each is actual payroll at its start year, compounded forward at RPI alone, so the gap to the solid line is what the pay bill would have cost had a cap been applied from that year. The later the cap starts, the closer it tracks — a 2015 cap would have saved the most, a 2022 cap the least, of the three shown. Every series is chain-linked across two accounting breaks that would otherwise read as payroll growth: the 2022 folding-in of the Social Security Funds (+£230m of contribution income, only +£1.2m of payroll, since the funds employ almost nobody), and the 2024 move to full IPSAS compliance, which both consolidated the trading and controlled entities into payroll (+£80m) and restated 2023 committee pay down £18.0m under IPSAS 39 with identical headcount. The series tracks the “Committees” subtotal only — core government, excluding States Members, trading entities, controlled entities and the funds’ own staff — the one line every year’s Pay Costs & FTE appendix reports on a comparable basis.

Payroll growth, 2015–2025

+64.3%

vs +42.9% RPI

2025 gap vs RPI-only

£43.1m

one year alone

Cumulative gap, decade

£152m

2015–2025, summed

Pay per FTE growth

+38.5%

below RPI (+42.9%)

FTE growth

+822

+18.6%, the whole excess

States of Guernsey Accounts, “Pay Costs & FTE” appendix, 2016 and 2018–2025 editions — gov.gg/accounts. RPI: States of Guernsey RPI series, December year-on-year — gov.gg/rpi.

Reading the gap

It’s headcount, not pay awards

The finding that changes the argument for an RPI-linked pay cap.

Payroll rose 64.3% over the decade against RPI of 42.9% — on its own, that reads as pay running well ahead of inflation. But split the pay bill into its two components and the picture inverts: pay per FTE rose only 38.5%, below RPI. The average States post got marginally cheaper in real terms over the decade. The entire excess is volume — 822 more FTE, up 18.6%.

That matters for how any pay-restraint policy gets framed. An RPI cap on the total pay bill, sold as a check on generous pay awards, would in practice have been a cap on headcount — because headcount, not the pay rate, is what has actually driven the bill above inflation. The £152m cumulative gap over the decade is close to the £43.6m operating deficit Core Government ran in 2024 (the fairer year to test against, since 2025 was flattered by one-off corporate tax and Pillar 2 receipts) — worth knowing before framing this as a story about pay rather than staffing.

Caveat: the pay-per-head split is the softer of the two numbers here, given the IPSAS 39 pension-cost change, group pension costs falling from £29.4m to £21.9m in 2025, and 53 FTE moving off agency onto contracted hours in the same year — any of which nudges the per-head figure without reflecting an actual pay decision. The total pay bill, and the £152m cumulative gap, is the robust figure.