You can build a useful first workforce plan for a city or county with a spreadsheet and the records your payroll system already holds. A dedicated data analyst can help with data quality and reporting, and can support more advanced forecasting, but a small HR team doesn’t need one to get started. Start with a narrow scope and the records you already have. Focus on the job families that matter most to service delivery. Local government workforce planning at this scale comes down to comparing the staff you have today with the staff you’ll need in 2 or 3 years, then deciding what to do about the difference.
This guide walks a small HR team through that process from start to finish. It draws on public planning models from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and the Government Accountability Office (GAO), scaled down for a town of 40 employees or a county of 800. You’ll see which records to pull and how to turn short interviews with department heads into a demand forecast. Every step assumes you’re working in Excel or Google Sheets, with no new software needed for the first version.
TL;DR:
You can run local government workforce planning without an analyst by keeping the scope narrow and the math simple. Start with the 5 to 10 job families your services can’t run without. Pull hire dates, retirement eligibility, funding sources, and position data into 1 spreadsheet built around positions rather than people. Use age bands only when they answer a specific planning question and you have appropriate privacy controls. Calculate turnover and time to fill for each job family, then count who becomes retirement-eligible within 3 years. Interview every department head about demand over the next 2 to 3 years. Rank the gaps by risk and pick strategies your budget can carry. Refresh the numbers every quarter and rewrite the plan once a year alongside the budget.
What a Local Government Workforce Plan Actually Covers
A workforce plan is a written comparison between the workforce you have and the workforce your services will need, along with the steps you’ll take to close the difference. OPM describes workforce planning as a systematic way to find and address gaps between today’s workforce and future human capital needs. For local government workforce planning, that definition works just as well in a county road department as in a federal agency. The document itself can be short, often 10 to 15 pages plus a spreadsheet.
The plan sits between the budget and the org chart. The budget tells you how many positions you can fund. Succession planning focuses on who could step into specific leadership roles when a director or chief leaves. The workforce plan covers the whole staff, including frontline roles like equipment operators and dispatchers, and it feeds both of those processes with better information. When council asks why you need 2 new utility workers, this document is where the answer lives.
It helps to see each piece of the plan as a question with a known source. The table below maps the core elements to the records or people that supply them.
| Plan Element | Question It Answers | Typical Source |
| Workforce snapshot | Who works here now, in which roles? | Payroll and HR records |
| Supply forecast | Who is likely to leave, and when? | Pension data and turnover history |
| Demand forecast | What roles and skills will we need? | Department heads and the budget |
| Gap analysis | Where will supply fall short of demand? | Your spreadsheet comparison |
| Action plan | What will we do about each gap? | HR with finance and leadership |
| Review schedule | How will we track progress? | Quarterly HR reporting |
Why Cities and Counties Can’t Keep Putting It Off
Retirement risk is the main reason local government workforce planning has moved up the priority list. In MissionSquare Research Institute’s latest workforce survey, 46% of state and local HR leaders said the biggest wave of retirements is still ahead, and half rated succession planning as very important. Yet 61% of respondents reported having no succession planning process at all. That gap between concern and action is where a small office can help without adding staff.
Recruiting pressure has eased, which makes this a good window to plan instead of react. According to the 2025 State and Local Government Workforce Survey report, the share of respondents calling 19 key occupations hard to fill dropped by 10 percentage points or more since 2022. Fewer governments listed competitive pay as a critical priority, falling to 70% in 2025 from 79% the year before. The survey drew 382 responses from public sector HR professionals. When hiring is less frantic, HR finally has room to look 2 or 3 years out rather than filling this month’s vacancies.
The scale of the sector matters too. The U.S. Census Bureau reported 91,438 local governments in 2025, including 38,704 general-purpose governments. At the same time, NASRA’s summary of federal data shows state and local employment reached about 20.7 million people as of June 2026, roughly 685,000 above the February 2020 peak. More staff means more institutional knowledge at risk when long-tenured employees retire.
Why You Don’t Need a Data Analyst to Start
The records needed for a first plan are often already in payroll, pension, budget, and HR systems, but their quality varies. Payroll may hold hire dates, job titles, pay grades, and department codes. Your pension system may show who is eligible to retire and when, while the budget office tracks authorized positions and funding sources. Before you rely on those fields, check for missing records and duplicate titles. Also confirm that classification and position-control records line up well enough to support consistent job-family groupings.
Most of the math in a first plan is counting and simple percentages. You’ll count how many people left last year and how many become retirement-eligible soon. You’ll also measure how long each type of job takes to fill. Formulas like COUNTIFS and AVERAGE can handle that work. Advanced forecasting may be unnecessary for a first plan when the population is small and the near-term risks are already visible. If your fire department has 22 firefighters and 4 become eligible to retire within the planning window, that fact is useful before you build a more complex model.
The harder part of local government workforce planning is judgment, and that belongs to people who know the organization. A data analyst can improve reporting or test assumptions, but department heads still need to explain the operational changes behind the numbers. The building official, for example, can tell HR that workload will rise when a new subdivision breaks ground. Before planning by job family, verify that your classification structure and position-control records are current enough to group roles consistently. If they aren’t, clean or reconcile them before using them as the planning baseline.
Pick a Planning Model That Fits a Small Team
Local government workforce planning doesn’t need a custom method, because several public models exist and they agree on the basics. The OPM Workforce Planning Guide published in November 2022 lays out 5 steps: set strategic direction, analyze the workforce and its gaps, develop an action plan, put it into practice, and evaluate and revise it. It was written for federal agencies, but its checklists translate well to a city, and it’s free to download.
GAO took a principles-based approach in its report on key principles for effective strategic workforce planning. It stresses involving top management and employees from the start and naming the critical skills your mission depends on. It also calls for strategies designed around specific gaps, plus steady tracking of results. The report dates to 2003, yet the principles still hold for local government workforce planning. A 2009 report from the IBM Center for The Business of Government offers a 7-step model that blends IPMA-HR and OPM concepts, and its environmental scan step is useful for fast-growing communities.
| Model | Structure | Best Use for a Small Team |
| OPM Workforce Planning Guide (2022) | 5 steps with checklists | Overall structure and step checklists |
| GAO-04-39 (2003) | 5 principles | Leadership buy-in and defining critical skills |
| IBM Center 7-step model (2009) | 7 steps | Adding an external scan for growth or economic change |
| City-level practice (ICMA examples) | 3 steps | Keeping the effort light in very small jurisdictions |
This guide follows a condensed sequence that borrows from all of them, sized for a small HR team of 1 to 5 people doing this alongside regular HR work.
Set Scope and Get Leadership Behind the Plan
Start by getting a sponsor at the top, because a plan without leadership support becomes a file nobody opens. In most cities and counties, that sponsor is the manager or chief administrative officer. Ask for 2 commitments: department heads will make time for a 45-minute interview, and the finished plan will be discussed during budget preparation. GAO’s first principle makes the same point about involving top management early. A short memo from the manager announcing the project helps participation.
Next, narrow the scope so you can actually finish. Trying to cover every position at once is the most common reason local government workforce planning projects stall. Pick a planning horizon that matches your budget cycle, usually 2 or 3 years. Then choose the job families where a sudden loss would hurt services or legal compliance most. For a typical city, that list might include water and wastewater operators, 911 dispatchers, police officers, building inspectors, and finance staff with specialized accounting knowledge.
Use this checklist to lock down scope before you pull any data:
• Name the executive sponsor and the HR lead who owns the spreadsheet.
• Set the planning horizon, such as fiscal years 2027 through 2029.
• Select 5 to 10 critical job families using service impact and hiring difficulty as filters.
• Form a working group with HR, a finance representative, and 2 or 3 department heads.
• Agree on a target date to present the first version to leadership.
• Decide who can see individual-level data and who will only see summaries.
The working group keeps the plan grounded. Finance can confirm which positions are grant-funded or frozen, and department heads can flag work that’s about to change.
Build a Workforce Snapshot From Records You Already Have
The snapshot is the foundation of local government workforce planning, and it should be a spreadsheet with 1 row per authorized position rather than 1 row per employee. That choice matters more than any formula. When you build around positions, vacancies show up as empty rows instead of disappearing, and you can see funded roles that nobody holds. Start with the budget office’s position control list, then match current employees to each position using payroll data.
Pull only the fields you’ll use. Every extra column is something you’ll need to maintain each quarter, and a small HR team doesn’t have time to update data nobody reads.
| Data Field | Where to Find It | Why It Matters |
| Position number and title | Budget or position control | Anchors each row and shows vacancies |
| Department and job family | HR classification plan | Lets you group results |
| Hire date | Payroll or HRIS | Drives tenure and turnover math |
| Age band (optional) | Payroll (date of birth) | Use only for a defined planning need with privacy controls |
| Retirement eligibility date | Pension system or plan rules | Preferred field for retirement exposure when available |
| Funding source | Finance | Flags grant-funded roles at risk |
| License or certification | Department records | Highlights hard-to-replace credentials |
| Vacancy status and date | HR recruiting log | Feeds vacancy rate and time to fill |
Handle personal data with care. Use retirement eligibility dates from pension records as the preferred field for retirement exposure when they’re available. Age bands can be useful for a defined planning question, but don’t make them a default field if eligibility data already answers it. If age data is needed, keep dates of birth restricted and share only the minimum summary needed, with privacy controls that fit your jurisdiction. Your pension administrator can often run a report showing each member’s earliest unreduced retirement date, which is more accurate than guessing from age and service. If you’re in a statewide plan, ask its employer services team what reports are available at no cost.
Measure Retirement and Turnover Risk With Simple Math
Supply forecasting sounds technical, but for a small jurisdiction it’s 4 numbers per job family. Calculate each for the last 12 months, and for retirement, look forward 1, 3, and 5 years. Keep the formulas in a separate tab so a small HR team can check each other’s work.
Turnover Rate
Turnover rate is separations during the year divided by average headcount, multiplied by 100. Split it into voluntary quits, retirements, and involuntary separations, because each calls for a different response. A high quit rate among new hires points to onboarding or pay problems. A high retirement count points to knowledge transfer and succession planning. With small numbers, a single departure can swing the rate a lot, so look at 2 or 3 years of history before drawing conclusions about any job family with fewer than 10 people.
Retirement Eligibility
Count how many employees in each job family reach retirement eligibility within your planning windows. A COUNTIFS formula that checks job family and eligibility date handles this in 1 line. Eligibility isn’t the same as intent, since many people work well past their first eligible date. Still, eligibility shows where the exposure sits, and it’s the number leadership understands fastest. Pair it with a count of eligible employees who hold critical licenses or unique knowledge.
Vacancy Rate and Time to Fill
Vacancy rate is vacant funded positions divided by total funded positions. Time to fill is the number of days from approval to post a job until the new hire starts. Long time to fill in a job family with high retirement exposure is the clearest warning sign you’ll find, because it means each loss will leave a hole for months.
A Worked Example
Here’s an illustrative example, using made-up numbers for a county road department with 24 funded positions. Last year the department averaged 22 filled positions and lost 4 people, a turnover rate of about 18%. Within 3 years, 5 employees reach retirement eligibility, which is 21% of the funded workforce. Of those 5, 2 hold commercial driver’s licenses with the endorsements the department needs for snow operations. The last 3 equipment operator hires took an average of 94 days to fill. Put together, those numbers tell the road superintendent something specific: without action, the department could face a winter short 2 licensed operators with a 3-month hiring lag.
Forecast Future Demand by Talking to Department Heads
Payroll shows supply, but demand comes from people and plans. Department heads know about workload changes, and the budget and capital improvement plan show what’s coming. A new fire station changes staffing needs, and so does a grant that ends in 18 months. Local government workforce planning works best when HR gathers this information through short, structured conversations rather than long surveys.
Questions to Ask Each Department Head
Keep each interview to about 45 minutes and ask the same questions every time, so the answers are comparable across departments:
1. Which roles would stop or slow a core service if they were vacant for 3 months?
2. What changes in workload do you expect over the next 2 to 3 years, and why?
3. Are any new facilities or annexations planned that will need staff?
4. Which skills or certifications will your team need that it doesn’t have today?
5. Who holds knowledge that isn’t written down anywhere?
6. Which positions depend on grants or temporary funding?
7. Where could technology or a shared service reduce the need for new hires?
Turning Interviews Into Numbers
After each conversation, record the expected change in positions and any new skill needs for every job family in the spreadsheet. Add a confidence rating of high, medium, or low, which stops a guess from looking like a commitment. When the city manager of Fredericksburg, Texas, presented his city’s approach at an ICMA conference, the first step was a needs assessment built on employee interviews about future plans and expected retirement dates, along with staffing estimates tied to population growth. Any small city can copy that model.
Be careful with retirement conversations. Start with retirement eligibility data from pension records rather than asking employees to predict when they’ll leave. If your jurisdiction wants to use an intent survey, have counsel review the approach first. Use neutral questions and administer them consistently. Participation should be voluntary. Don’t use individual responses as a basis for adverse employment decisions. Federal age-discrimination law applies to employment decisions, and state or local rules may add requirements.
Find the Gaps and Rank Them by Risk
In local government workforce planning, a gap is the difference between projected demand and projected supply for each job family. Projected supply equals current filled positions, minus expected losses, plus anyone ready to move up from inside. Projected demand equals current funded positions plus any growth department heads described. You’ll end up with a gap number for each critical job family, and some gaps will be about skills rather than headcount.
Not every gap deserves the same attention, and a small team can’t work on 10 at once. One simple illustrative method is to score each gap on 2 factors from 1 to 3. Impact reflects how badly services would suffer if the gap stays open. Likelihood reflects how probable the gap is, based on retirement eligibility and the jurisdiction’s history of turnover or time to fill. Multiply the 2 scores to get a priority from 1 to 9. This is a planning aid, not an established public-sector standard.
| Job Family (Illustrative) | Gap Description | Impact | Likelihood | Priority |
| Water plant operators | 3 of 6 eligible to retire in 3 years; state license required | 3 | 3 | 9 |
| 911 dispatchers | High first-year quit rate | 3 | 2 | 6 |
| Building inspectors | Workload rising with new subdivisions | 2 | 3 | 6 |
| Accounting staff | 1 person holds grant reporting knowledge | 2 | 2 | 4 |
| Parks maintenance | Seasonal hiring delays | 1 | 2 | 2 |
In the example above, a score of 6 or higher can trigger an action plan and an owner, while lower scores can stay on a watch list. Treat that threshold as a starting point rather than a rule. Adjust it for service criticality and hiring difficulty, then fit it to budget timing and your jurisdiction’s risk tolerance. The purpose of the ranking is to turn a long list of concerns into a short list of decisions leadership can review and fund.
Choose Gap-Closing Strategies You Can Afford
Match each priority gap to a strategy your budget can carry. Small jurisdictions rarely have money for large recruiting campaigns, but they often have options that cost more time than cash. In local government workforce planning, the right fix depends on the cause of the gap, so look at whether you’re losing people or facing new demand.
Build Talent From Within
Internal development is usually the cheapest fix for retirement gaps. Pair an employee eligible to retire with a successor for 6 to 12 months of job shadowing, and have the departing employee write down procedures that live only in their head. Career ladders, such as operator-in-training to certified operator, give current staff a reason to stay and give you a pipeline. This is where succession planning and workforce planning meet. ICMA’s knowledge network points to San Mateo County’s workforce and succession management program as a case study in developing talent at every level of an organization, and its lessons apply to much smaller employers too.
Change How You Recruit
If time to fill is the problem, review the job description before you spend more on advertising. Degree requirements that don’t match the actual work shrink your applicant pool for no benefit. The MissionSquare survey found that some governments now use skills assessments instead of degree requirements, and others give new hires faster access to paid leave. Both changes cost little.
Share or Borrow Talent
Very small jurisdictions can close some gaps without hiring at all. Interlocal agreements let neighboring towns share an inspector or an IT specialist. Where pension rules allow it, retirees can return part time to train replacements. ICMA has noted that a succession plan can be as simple as an informal talent management plan, and it suggests hosting a management fellow or student intern to build the next group of managers.
Write the Plan and Keep It Current
The written plan should be short enough that the city manager reads all of it. Use this outline for the first version:
1. A 1-page summary with the top 5 risks and the actions you recommend.
2. The workforce snapshot, shown as summary tables by department and job family.
3. Supply findings on turnover and retirement eligibility.
4. Demand findings from department head interviews.
5. The ranked gap table with impact and likelihood scores.
6. Strategies for each priority gap, each with an owner and a target date.
7. Metrics and the review schedule.
Present the plan to leadership before budget requests are finalized. Tie each strategy that costs money to a specific budget line, such as funding a trainee position 6 months before a known retirement. Council members respond well to concrete risks, so lead with examples like the water plant operator gap rather than overall percentages. A plan that shows up in the budget conversation gets funded far more often than a plan presented on its own.
Keeping local government workforce planning current takes less effort than the first build. Refresh the spreadsheet every quarter by logging every hire and separation since the last update. Once a year, rerun the department head interviews and rewrite the plan alongside the budget. GAO’s final principle calls for monitoring progress and evaluating results. For a small team, the most useful measures are time to fill for critical job families and the share of retirement-eligible critical roles with a named successor. First-year turnover is worth watching too.
Free Benchmarks and Tools for Small Public Sector HR Teams
Benchmarks help you judge whether your numbers are unusual, and the best ones are free. Federal data covers turnover and employment trends, while professional associations publish surveys on public sector HR practice. They give you context when leadership asks whether a 15% turnover rate is high.
| Source | What It Gives You | How to Use It |
| BLS Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey | Monthly quits and separations for state and local government | Compare your turnover to national public sector rates |
| Census Annual Survey of Public Employment and Payroll | Employment and payroll by government function | Compare staffing by function with similar governments |
| MissionSquare and PSHRA annual survey | Recruiting and retention trends | Spot practices peers are adopting |
| ICMA and state municipal leagues | Case studies and peer networks | Borrow tools from cities your size |
The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey each month, with separate lines for state and local government education and non-education employers. For staffing comparisons, the Census Bureau’s 2022 public employment and payroll datasets include local government data organized by function, such as police or highways. Pick 1 or 2 functions that matter most rather than analyzing everything.
Professional groups fill in the practice side. PSHRA has partnered on the annual state and local government workforce survey with MissionSquare and NASPE since 2009, which makes it useful for tracking trends over time. In California, the Institute for Local Government hosted a webinar on moving from reactive backfilling to workforce planning with HR staff from West Sacramento and San Mateo County. Its resource list includes San Mateo County’s workforce planning report, and reviewing a real plan from a nearby government is often the fastest way to decide what yours should look like.
Spreadsheets work well for a first plan and for many jurisdictions indefinitely. Consider an HRIS workforce planning module when you’re rebuilding the same spreadsheet by hand every quarter or when your headcount grows past a few hundred. By then you’ll know which reports you need.
Mistakes That Stall Small-Team Workforce Plans
The most common mistake is waiting for perfect data. Your records will have gaps, such as missing certification dates or inconsistent job titles. Fix what you can in a week and note the rest as a known limitation. A plan built on mostly accurate data today beats a flawless plan that never ships.
Building the spreadsheet around employees instead of positions is the second trap. It hides vacancies, and vacancies are often where the biggest risks sit. Grant-funded roles get missed the same way. If a position depends on money that expires in 18 months, the plan needs to say so, because losing that funding creates a gap as real as any retirement.
Treating the plan as an HR-only project also sinks many efforts in public sector HR. When department heads don’t help shape the demand forecast, they won’t trust the gap list. Keep them involved from the first interview through the final review.
Finally, plans fail when strategies lack an owner and a date. “Improve knowledge transfer” isn’t a strategy. “The utilities director will pair each retirement-eligible operator with a trainee by March 2027” is. Every priority gap needs an owner and a deadline, and each should come up at the next quarterly review.
Conclusion
A small HR team can build a useful first workforce plan without a dedicated data analyst. Start with 1 clean spreadsheet built around positions and honest conversations with department heads. The first plan can use records the jurisdiction already maintains, and the models from OPM and GAO provide a tested structure for the work.
Start with your most critical job families and get a first version finished. The quarterly refresh will improve it over time. With 46% of public sector HR leaders expecting the biggest retirement wave still ahead, the jurisdictions that plan now will have successors trained before the vacancies arrive. The ones that wait will keep backfilling in a hurry, 1 retirement at a time.
Frequently Asked Questions
What Is Local Government Workforce Planning?
It’s the process of comparing a city or county’s current staff with the staff it will need in the next few years, then choosing actions to close the difference. It covers headcount, skills, retirement risk, turnover, and future demand. The result is a written plan tied to the budget and reviewed on a regular schedule.
Can a Small HR Team Build a Workforce Plan Without Special Software?
Yes. A spreadsheet in Excel or Google Sheets handles everything a first plan needs, including turnover rates and gap scores. Software becomes worth a look once rebuilding the spreadsheet each quarter takes too long.
How Long Does It Take to Build a First Plan?
It depends on your size and how clean your records are. Budget a few months of part-time work for the first version. For a small HR team, most of that time goes to cleaning data and interviewing department heads. Later updates go much faster because the spreadsheet and interview guide already exist.
What Data Do I Need to Start?
You need a list of authorized positions, hire dates, department and job family codes, retirement eligibility dates, funding sources, and vacancy dates. Most of this comes from payroll and your pension system, with position data from the budget office. Add license data for roles where credentials are hard to replace. Use age bands only when they answer a specific planning question and your privacy controls support their use.
How Many Job Families Should the First Plan Cover?
Start with 5 to 10 job families where a vacancy would hurt services or compliance most. Common choices include water operators, dispatchers, police officers, inspectors, and specialized finance staff. Expand coverage in later years.
How Is a Workforce Plan Different From Succession Planning?
Succession planning prepares specific people to step into specific roles, usually leadership or highly specialized positions. A workforce plan looks at the whole organization, including frontline jobs, and covers demand changes as well as departures. It often recommends succession planning as a strategy for its highest-risk gaps.
How Do I Calculate Turnover Rate?
Divide the number of separations in a 12-month period by the average headcount for that period, then multiply by 100. Track each type of separation separately. For job families with fewer than 10 employees, look at 2 or 3 years of history before drawing conclusions.
Is It Legal to Ask Employees About Their Retirement Plans?
Start with retirement eligibility data from pension records. If you also want to ask employees about retirement intent, have counsel review the survey and any state or local rules. Use neutral questions consistently. Keep participation voluntary, and don’t use individual answers for adverse employment decisions.
Where Can I Find Benchmarks for Public Sector HR Metrics?
The BLS Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey publishes monthly turnover data for state and local government. The Census Bureau publishes public employment and payroll data by function. For practice trends, the annual survey from MissionSquare, PSHRA, and NASPE is widely used in public sector HR.
How Often Should the Plan Be Updated?
Refresh the spreadsheet every quarter with hires and separations. Rewrite the full plan once a year during budget preparation, and rerun department head interviews at the same time. Update sooner after a major event, such as an annexation or the loss of a large grant.
Who Should Be Involved Besides HR?
Include an executive sponsor such as the city or county manager, a finance representative, and 2 or 3 department heads. Finance confirms funding and position data, while department heads supply the demand forecast. Their involvement makes leadership far more likely to trust and fund the plan.
What If Our Data Is Incomplete or Messy?
Clean what you can in about a week, then document the remaining gaps as known limitations. Most first plans work with imperfect data, and each quarterly refresh can fix a few more fields.
How Do I Rank Workforce Gaps?
One simple illustrative method is to score each gap from 1 to 3 on impact and likelihood, then multiply the scores. A jurisdiction might use 6 as an action threshold, but it should adjust that cutoff for service criticality and hiring difficulty, then fit it to budget timing and local risk tolerance. The matrix is a prioritization aid, not a universal workforce-planning standard.
What Are Low-Cost Ways to Close Workforce Gaps?
Job shadowing, written procedures from retiring staff, career ladders, and updated job descriptions cost more time than money. Very small jurisdictions can also share specialists through interlocal agreements. Where pension rules allow it, retirees can return part time to train their replacements.
How Do I Get Council to Fund Workforce Plan Strategies?
Present the plan before budget requests are finalized and link each strategy to a specific budget line. Lead with concrete risks, such as a water plant that could lose half its licensed operators in 3 years. Specific examples persuade elected officials more than overall percentages do.
