Where Wisconsin state employees live and work

By the numbers

Of the nearly 30,000 Wisconsin state employees, 11,501 of them, 38%, work in Dane County. Dane County is also where the greatest number of state employees live — 8,051, about 27.4% of all state employees.

But Dane isn’t the county with the greatest share of its population employed by the state. That’s Juneau, which has a population of 26,594 and is home to 538 state employees — over 2% of the population.

Juneau County includes both the Sand Ridge Secure Treatment Center and the New Lisbon Correctional Institution. Sand Ridge, organized under the Wisconsin Department of Health Services, boasted more than 500 full-time positions, according to a 2014 report, and was one of the largest employers in the area. New Lisbon Correctional had 286 staff positions, according to a 2024 annual report. In total, 889 state employees worked in Juneau County in 2024.

Dane County had the second-highest state employee density, at 1.4% of the population working for the state, followed by Columbia at 1.23%.

Other counties where large numbers of state employees work are Milwaukee, with 2,371 employees, or 8.1% of all state employees, Winnebago with 2,225, or 7.2%, Racine with 1,437, or 4.9%, and Dodge with 1,238 employees, or 4.2% of the state employee workforce.

The figures come from a Department of Administration report published in 2024. The totals include civil servants but omit elected officials, political appointees, and employees of the University of Wisconsin system.

The underlying numbers