NAIROBI, Kenya, Sept 9 – Kenya’s public wage bill is projected to ease in the third quarter of the 2024/2025 financial year, with both the national and county governments recording a decline in wage-bill-to-revenue ratios, according to the Salaries and Remuneration Commission (SRC).
The Third Quarter Wage Bill Bulletin released on Monday shows the county governments’ wage-bill-to-revenue ratio is expected to dip from 43.34 percent in Q2 to 35.38 percent in Q3, with wage expenditure projected to fall to Sh54.66 billion, down from Sh63.63 billion.
At the national level, the ratio is expected to drop from 28.02 percent to 26.46 percent, with expenditure shrinking from Sh153.71 billion in Q2 to Sh130.79 billion in Q3.
“The wage bill to nominal GDP ratio was estimated at 7.58 percent in FY 2022/2023 and then to 7.19 percent in FY 2023/2024,” SRC noted in the bulletin.
“The wage bill to ordinary revenue ratio is estimated to have dropped from 43.54 percent in FY 2022/2023, to 40.45 percent in FY 2023/2024.”
During the quarter, SRC received 30 requests from public service institutions seeking approvals with a combined financial implication of Sh411.7 million.
After review, the Commission’s advice cut this to Sh281.4 million, representing 68.4 percent of the requests.
Allowances and benefits accounted for the majority of the requests at 76 percent, followed by productivity and performance (10 percent), collective bargaining (7 percent), and job evaluation and salary structures (7 percent).
The data further shows that the Teachers Service Commission (TSC) remained the largest public employer, with staff numbers growing 5.2 percent from 390,400 in 2023 to 410,700 in 2024.
Ministries and extra-budgetary institutions followed with 236,700 employees, while county governments employed 226,500.
The total number of public servants crossed the one million mark in 2024, reaching 1.023 million employees.
