Scottish Government staff numbers by grade: FOI release

Information requested

The number of staff by grade including senior civil servants in Scottish Government main for each of the past 7 years.

Response

The number of staff by grade in the core Scottish Government directorates is provided below. The data has been extracted from Scottish Government's HR systems and is in line with the latest published official workforce statistics available here Scottish Government workforce information - gov.scot (www.gov.scot)). The data is based on the position as at 31 March of each year from 2018 to 2024.

The HR system is an administrative database. As such, it is continually updated when workers join and leave the Scottish Government and personal details change. As with any large scale administration system, it may be subject to errors with data entry and processing, and short delays in processing changes to the data. Therefore there is a possibility that there may be out of date data errors presented, as the “snapshot” may be taken at a point before records are updated or corrected.

The data presented is the working grade of staff, meaning staff on temporary promotion or in receipt of a Temporary Responsibility Supplement (TRS) are shown at the grade they were working at on the snapshot date.

Headcount of SG Core workforce by working grade, March 2018 to March 2024
	Mar-18	Mar-19	Mar-20	Mar-21	Mar-22	Mar-23	Mar-24
Grade
A3	497	480	476	376	397	341	289
A4	350	399	395	397	432	421	388
B1	916	1013	1083	1084	1165	1155	1122
B2	1071	1308	1439	1544	1757	1843	1743
B3	1190	1382	1582	1705	2069	2196	2313
BFS	57	55	67	53	49	50	57
C1	967	1130	1296	1442	1634	1773	1873
C2	419	489	550	668	775	822	866
C3	108	101	137	139	145	132	126
SCS1 - Deputy Director	123	131	143	191	202	224	220
SCS2 - Director	35	40	42	56	57	56	59
SCS3 - Director General	6	6	5	6	7	7	8
SCS4 - Permanent Secretary	1	1	1	1	2	1	1
NA*	171	154	152	154	155	154	157
All	5911	6689	7368	7816	8846	9175	9222

​​​​​​​*NA grades are primarily seafaring staff in Marine Directorate

About FOI

The Scottish Government is committed to publishing all information released in response to Freedom of Information requests. View all FOI responses at http://www.gov.scot/foi-responses.