Guernsey's Pay Bill: Where a Decade of Hiring Leads by 2035

To roughly the whole of today's income tax take, inside ten years. The States of Guernsey's core-government pay bill has grown 64.3% since 2015 against RPI of 42.9%. Carry that growth forward at the rate it has actually run and, by 2035, the wage bill for core government committees alone reaches £542.8m on the slower ten-year rate, or £668.3m on the faster five-year one. Every penny of income tax Guernsey collected in 2025, personal and corporate, was £527.6m.

The numbers

• Core-government committee payroll rose from £201.0m in 2015 to £330.3m in 2025, up 64.3% against RPI of 42.9%.
• Pay per full-time equivalent rose 38.5% — below inflation. The average States post got about 3% cheaper in real terms.
• The entire excess over inflation is volume: +822 FTE, +18.6%, from 4,408 to 5,230.
• But not the jobs most people assume: on the accounts' staff-by-pay-group table, roughly two thirds of the decade's growth is medical staff. Established staff, the nearest thing to a civil service, grew by about 200.
• Had the bill been held to RPI from 2015, 2025's payroll would have been £287.2m — £43.2m lower, with £152.0m of cumulative cash across the decade.
• Projected to 2035 at the same growth: £542.8m (ten-year rate, 5.09%/yr) to £668.3m (five-year rate, 7.30%/yr).
• That increase of £212.5m–£338.0m a year is 4.2× to 6.8× the ~£50m net that the whole GST-plus package is designed to raise.

Explore the data

Who was actually hired

“Core government” is a scope — which committees are counted — not a job type. So the rise of 822 posts says nothing about which jobs grew, and read as “822 more civil servants” it is wrong by a factor of four.

The accounts answer that question in a different table: staff by pay group, note 7 of the 2016 accounts and note 6c of the 2025 accounts. On that basis, excluding the controlled entities consolidated into the accounts only from 2024 so that both years count the same population, core government went from 4,418 to 5,298 average FTE. Where the growth went:

• Medical staff: 1,012 to 1,596, up 584. Nurses and clinical consultants, up 58% in a decade.
• Established staff: 1,655 to 1,854, up 199. The closest thing Guernsey has to a civil service.
• Educational staff: 804 to 934, up 130.
• Uniformed services: 349 to 416, up 67.
• Manual and other pay groups: 598 to 498, down 100.

Established staff is about 35% of the workforce, and even that overstates the administrative share: the accounts define the group as including social workers, psychologists, environmental health officers, safeguarding, regulatory, justice and probation roles. Roughly two thirds of the decade's growth is medical.

That reframes the argument. This is not a story about administrators multiplying. It is a story about a health and care workforce growing by more than half, inside a total wage bill that has outrun inflation, on an island being told its health service is unsustainable.

One caution if you quote these numbers. The pay-group table totals 4,418 to 5,298; the Pay Costs & FTE appendix behind the payroll series totals 4,408 to 5,230. The two use slightly different scopes. Both are right on their own basis, and they should never be quoted in the same sentence.

Why the published figures cannot be compared directly

Reading “total pay costs” straight off consecutive sets of accounts gives £287.7m in 2022 and £396.0m in 2024, which looks like 38% growth in two years. Most of that is scope, not spending. Two changes broke the run of numbers, in opposite directions.

2022: the Guernsey Insurance Fund and Long Term Care Insurance Fund were consolidated into “Core Government”. That added around £209m of contribution income but only £1.8m of payroll, because the funds employ almost nobody — so pay as a share of revenue fell for reasons that have nothing to do with pay.

2023 and 2024: the first fully IPSAS-compliant accounts consolidated Guernsey Electricity, Aurigny, Guernsey Post, the Housing Association and the trading entities, adding roughly £80m of payroll that was never in the earlier figures. Separately the pension charge moved from contributions paid to IPSAS 39 service cost, restating 2023 committee pay down £18.0m with identical headcount.

The fix is to measure one consistent thing — the “Committees” subtotal carried in every year's Pay Costs & FTE appendix — and chain-link across the breaks, taking each year-on-year growth rate from a single document reporting both years on its own basis. No restatement then appears as growth. And the answer is expressed in pounds, never as a ratio to revenue, because the saving is a function of the payroll series and RPI only.

What a bill that size looks like from outside

Saint Lucia is a Commonwealth island with a Westminster parliament and 180,156 people, nearly three times Guernsey's 64,781. It runs the entire country — health, education, police, courts, roads, everything — on total government spending of about £560m a year.

By 2035, on the slower of the two trends, the wage bill for Guernsey's core-government committees alone reaches 97% of that figure. On the faster trend, 119%.

The comparison is deliberately not like-for-like, and that is the point of it: one is a payroll, the other is a whole national budget. It is not a claim that Guernsey could be run on Saint Lucia's money, or that the two governments do the same things, or that a wealthy island should spend like a poorer one. It is a way of feeling the size of a number that is otherwise hard to hold. Saint Lucia's 2026/27 appropriation is EC$2.189bn, of which EC$140m is repayment of debt principal rather than spending; the £560m is the remainder, converted at the currency's fixed peg of EC$2.70 to the US dollar.

What this means

An “RPI cap” framed as pay restraint would have delivered close to nothing, because pay per head has already tracked below inflation. A cap on the total bill is a cap on headcount by another name. Over ten years it implies holding core government to roughly its 2015 establishment, or funding growth in one service by shrinking another.

The projection is a trajectory, not a prediction. Nothing is modelled: no pay settlement, no demographic shift, no policy decision, no economic shock, and the further out you read the less it is worth. Its claim is about the present — that the current path, simply continued, arrives somewhere the island would not choose. Every year the outturn lands below those lines is a year a decision was taken.

It also excludes the trading and controlled entities throughout, and makes no adjustment for population, service demand, the island's ageing profile or statutory duties added over the decade. It is a counterfactual on the arithmetic of the pay bill, not a judgement on whether the extra 822 posts were needed.