The Salaries and Remuneration Commission (SRC) has released the First Quarter Wage Bill Bulletin for the period July to September 2023 for the financial year (FY) 2023-2024. An extract is presented below:

Requests from public institutions

During the quarter, SRC approved requests worth Ksh 24,052.58 million, representing 60.4 percent of the total requests from public service institutions, which amounted to Ksh 39,801.57 million.

This amount represents 36 requests received from public institutions. These included 24 requests accounting for 67 percent of allowances and benefits; 8 requests accounting for 22 percent of collective bargaining agreements; and 4 requests accounting for 11 percent of bonuses.

Personnel Emolument for the County Government

The total expenditure of personnel emoluments (PE) in county governments in the first quarter of FY 2023–2024 is projected to increase to Ksh 107.23 billion, representing a 95.6% rise compared to the same period in FY 2022–2023. The expenditure on PE is projected to increase from Ksh 43.15 billion to Ksh 48.77 billion, representing a 13 percent growth.

This increase is attributed to the partial effect of the third cycle of salary reviews, which awarded county governments a pay review of 18.8 percent spread across two fiscal years. This could also be attributed to the growth of the county government’s expenditure in absolute terms.

Although the county quarterly PE component, as a share of the total expenditure, is projected to reduce from 78.7 percent in the first quarter of FY 2022/2023 to 45.5 percent in FY 2023/2024, this is still above but not more than 35 percent threshold set by the Public Finance Management (County Government) Regulations, 2015.

Personnel emoluments for the national government

The expenditure on PE in the national government is projected at Ksh 126.83 billion, compared to Ksh 130.89 billion in a similar period in FY 2022/2023.

The total expenditure is projected to increase from Ksh 336.65 billion in the first quarter of FY 2022/2023 to Ksh 363.38 billion in the same period in FY 2023/2024. Although the total PE is projected to grow in absolute terms, the PE vote as a share of the total revenue is projected to reduce from 19.2 percent in the first quarter of FY 2022/2023 to 17.3 percent in the same period in FY 2023/2024.

Public wage bill trends

The wage bill to nominal GDP ratio is projected to reduce marginally to 7.19 percent in FY 2023–2024. This ratio is projected to decline towards 7.5 percent, which is the average for developing countries, and 7 percent, which is the internationally desirable level.

The wage bill-to-ordinary revenue ratio is projected to be 43.54 percent in FY 2022-2023 and 40.45 percent in FY 2023-2024. Further, over the last eight years, the public wage bill to total revenue ratio was highest in FY 2020/2021 at 45.9 percent. It is projected to reduce to 32.15 percent in FY 2023–2024. The total wage bill is projected to grow at a slightly slower rate of 6.37 percent in FY 2023–2024.