State of Washington jobs

About 78,000 people worked in Washington state government as of June 30, 2026, not counting higher education: 76,484 in the executive branch, with the legislative and judicial branches adding fewer than a thousand each. Three agencies alone employ nearly half of that workforce, so an employer name this broad covers a lot of very different workplaces.

Most of these jobs are classified positions under state civil service law, and most are covered by collective bargaining agreements; a smaller share are at-will. Management stays comparatively small: 5,597 Washington Management Service employees as of the same date, held under a growth cap the state set in 2007. The state publishes its workforce composition too, down to the detail that 46.7 percent of non-managers and 51.9 percent of managers are female. Geography is the thing worth checking before you apply, though. About 71.7 percent of state employees work in just five counties, with the rest spread across the state, so where you want to live can narrow the list as fast as what you want to do. None of that describes any single opening, but it does tell you what kind of employer sits behind the posting: a big, structured, mostly unionized one.