Military and Civilian Pay Levels, Trends, and Recruit Quality

📖 The Scoop

In the all-volunteer military, pay is one of the most important policy tools for recruiting and retaining personnel. Military pay must be high enough to attract and retain the personnel needed to meet manning requirements, and one measure of pay adequacy is how it compares to the pay of civilians with similar characteristics. In 2002, the Ninth Quadrennial Review of Military Compensation recommended that regular military compensation (RMC) for enlisted personnel be at around the 70th percentile of the earnings of civilian workers with some college and, for officers, at around the 70th percentile of earnings of civilians with four or more years of college.RAND researchers found RMC for enlisted members and officers in 2016 to be at the 84th and 77th percentiles, respectively, averaged over all education levels. RMC was at the 87th percentile for enlisted members with some college and at the 85th for those with associate's degrees. For officers, RMC was at the 86th percentile for those with bachelor's degrees and around the 70th for those with master's degrees or higher. Controlling for the change in education levels among service members, the researchers also found the same overall percentiles for 2009. RMC has risen faster than civilian pay since 1999. The researchers found that, as this occurred, three military services (but not the Army) increased the quality of their recruits. The authors recommend further research into services' recruit-quality requirements and question whether broad increases in pay are cost-effective for increasing quality.

Genre: Business & Economics / Careers / General (fancy, right?)