An Updated Look at Military and Civilian Pay Levels and Recruit Quality

Abstract

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Setting the Level and Annual Adjustment of Military Pay

“…Our approach involved using military personnel and pay data provided by the Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC), active duty personnel survey data provided by DoD's Office of People Analytics, and Current Population Survey data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Our analysis builds on and extends previous studies that have computed RMC percentiles (Hosek, Asch, and Mattock, 2012;Hosek et al, 2018;Smith, Asch, and Mattock, 2020) and the Hosek, Asch, and Mattock (2012) study that computed the DECI and compared it with the ECI.…”

“…Recent RAND analysis has considered how military and civilian pay compared in more recent years (Smith, Asch, and Mattock, 2020). Our study of RMC percentiles for 2017 found that RMC was at the 85th percentile of the civilian wage distribution for enlisted personnel and at the 77th percentile of the civilian wage distribution for officers (Smith, Asch, and Mattock, 2020).…”

“…Recent RAND analysis has considered how military and civilian pay compared in more recent years (Smith, Asch, and Mattock, 2020). Our study of RMC percentiles for 2017 found that RMC was at the 85th percentile of the civilian wage distribution for enlisted personnel and at the 77th percentile of the civilian wage distribution for officers (Smith, Asch, and Mattock, 2020). These figures are somewhat less than the 90th percentile reported by the 11th QRMC for enlisted personnel and the 83rd percentile reported for officers, but we used a different methodology than the 11th QRMC.…”

“…Thus, assessment of pay adequacy needs to consider not only pay comparisons, including how military pay compares with the 70th percentile of comparable civilians, but also recruiting and retention outcomes. As shown in Smith, Asch, and Mattock (2020) and discussed in Hosek et al (2018), measures of recruit quality, a key metric of successful recruitment, have greatly exceeded the DoD benchmarks for recruit quality for all services except the Army since 2009. For the Army, both the percentage of recruits in AFQT categories I-IIIA and the percentage who are high school diploma graduates have equaled or exceeded the DoD benchmarks since 2009.…”

DoD Cyber Excepted Service Labor Market Analysis and Options for Use of Compensation Flexibilities

“…To overcome this limitation, we used a common substitute, years of potential experience, which is calculated as the difference between an individual's age and an assumed age at the time they completed their education (as measured before our recategorization). In other words, years of potential experience is calculated as age minus 18 years for high school graduates or high school dropouts, age minus 20 years for those with some college or associate's degrees, age minus 22 years for college graduates, and age minus 24 years for those with advanced degrees (Smith, Asch, and Mattock, 2020). The resulting number is the presumed number of years the individual has been in the workforce.…”