The federal government rubberstamped raises for 78 per cent of its employees last year, according to access-to-information records obtained by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

Meanwhile, departments barely meet half of their own performance targets.

And only 0.14 per cent of employees took a pay cut.

“Taxpayers have every reason to question why the vast majority of bureaucrats are taking bigger paycheques when departments can barely pass their own test,” said Franco Terrazzano, CTF Federal Director. “Federal bureaucrats shouldn’t feel entitled to more money every year just because they’re on the taxpayer payroll.”

The federal government gave 336,188 employees a pay raise last year, according to the records. That means 78 per cent of its employees took a pay raise in 2025. Just 596 employees received a pay cut.

Most federal bureaucrats take pay raises every year.

About 385,000 federal employees took a pay raise in 2024. The government handed out more than one million pay raises between 2020 and 2023. The government has continuously refused to disclose how much these pay hikes cost taxpayers.

This isn’t the first time the government has refused to disclose compensation costs. The CTF launched legal challenges against the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the Bank of Canada for refusing to disclose compensation for its senior bureaucrats.

“Taxpayers are on the hook for another wage hike, but the government won’t tell Canadians the price tag,” said Devin Drover, CTF General Counsel. “That’s another failure of Canada’s broken access-to-information system.

“Taxpayers pay these wages and they have a right to know the bill.”

In addition to a lack of transparency, the pay raises are rewarding dismal performance. In fact, federal departments consistently miss their own performance targets.

The government of Canada publishes its own data summarizing department performance results over five years. In two of those years, departments failed to meet half of their own targets. Their best year was 2024, when departments met 54 per cent of their own targets.

Government employees are now taking larger salaries than their counterparts working outside of government.

“Canada’s government-sector workers (from federal, provincial, and local governments) enjoyed a 4.8 per cent wage premium, on average, over their private-sector counterparts,” according to the Fraser Institute, which controlled for factors like age, gender, education and industry.

This reality isn’t stopping government unions from demanding more money from taxpayers. The Public Service Alliance of Canada is negotiating new contracts for its members and has already called the federal government’s wage offers “insulting” and “unacceptable.”

“What’s really insulting and unacceptable is how much the bureaucracy costs taxpayers and how little it delivers,” Terrazzano said. “Prime Minister Mark Carney needs to shrink the federal bureaucracy to stop borrowing money and provide Canadians with the tax relief they need.”

Carney has repeatedly said his government would “spend less,” while Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne said, “We need to bring back the civil service to a more sustainable level.”

However, the Parliamentary Budget Officer shows the cost of the bureaucracy is projected to keep climbing.

The cost of the bureaucracy is expected to reach $79.4 billion this year, which is more than it cost during former prime minister Justin Trudeau’s last year in office in 2024-25, even after accounting for inflation.   

This follows years of higher bureaucracy costs.

The cost of the federal bureaucracy increased 80 per cent between 2015 and 2024, according to the Public Accounts.

Half of Canadians say federal services have gotten worse since 2016, despite the massive increase in the bureaucracy, according to a Leger poll. Most Canadians support cutting the size and cost of the bureaucracy, according to the poll.