For those not in the know, the Australian Public Service is very strict in its pay and levels. And it’s broken down like this from lowest to highest:
- APS1
- APS2
- APS3
- APS4
- APS5
- APS6
- EL1
- EL2
Above the EL is the SES level, but that is entirely policy direction, blue sky thinking, closed door meetings, and all the other buzz words that mean they don’t “do the work”.
Inside of each of these levels they are usually broken down for purposes of pay scale, into sub-levels. For example someone who just got promoted to APS6 would be on the pay level APS6.1, and someone who has been one for a while would be an APS6.3, and this is around a 10% difference in pay from .1 to .3.
In this example I’m going to use the Department of Workplace Relations, as it seems fitting and I know where to find their pay level document.
As you can tell from the acronym, APS and EL are different roles. APS stands for Australian Public Servant, and EL stands for Executive Level. Broadly this means the APS staff “do the work” and the EL staff are more managerial in nature.
Therefore, the highest someone can get paid at DEWR, while still doing the day to day “work” that needs to get done, is an APS6.3 earning (as of 12th of March 2026) $115,768.
To earn a single dollar more than that, they need to get bumped up into the EL bracket, which ranges from $129,447 for an entry level EL1 up to $182,891 for a top level EL2.
What this boils down to, is if you want to work in the APS as a coder, working on Drupal websites, building templates, writing CSS, coding decoupled components, your pay cap will be $115,768. If you want anymore than that, you need to put down the tools and start managing people.
And I can tell you from experience, the best developers don’t make the best managers. Someone I worked with was a great coder, but wanted/needed more money so got a promotion to EL1. And overnight they were expected to go from knowing every Drupal theme hook, to knowing how to manage and motivate a team of developers.
This is because the APS, similar to the education system, was set up decades ago, and not pivoted to take into account the changing times. It is assumed that in order to warrant paying someone more money, that they need to manage people.
A quick glance at Seek.com.au and I can find a number of PHP or Web Development jobs, mostly starting at $130,000+super all the way up to $180,000+super. That is at the top and beyond the reaches of an EL2’s pay.
I have heard of some Departments that have a separate Technical banding, so you could have a Technical-EL1 or a Technical-EL2 as a way of providing people with compensation that matches the private sector, but without the inherent requirement to manage staff. But this is not nearly as widespread as it should be.
And while not entirely related, I found some interesting facts while researching this.
First of all, every election the Liberals beat their chest and decry the public service as being bloated, and how we need to cut cut cut! Which is a great political win, because everyone has had a bad interaction with Government, and wants that person to be fired.
Of course, they don’t think about how much worse the service would be if suddenly half the people answering phones was fired… but still…
Take a guess as to what year the APS was the most bloated. Must be recently right? With all these departments and agencies for useless things like “The Arts” and “Science” right…
Nineteen Sixty Eight. In 1968 the Public Service was 211,652 people.
In fact our current APS is only 185,343 according to the 2024 State of the Service report. That is the same as 1965. Except in 1965, those 180-ish thousand APS staff were providing services to only 11.3 million people, compared to our current similar staffing level, providing services to 27.2 million people.