If it feels like your finance or HR department has fewer experienced hands than it used to, the data backs that up. Local governments across the country are moving through what workforce researchers have started calling the "Silver Tsunami" — a sustained wave of retirements among longtime public employees, arriving faster than most agencies can backfill for it. For back-office teams that run on institutional knowledge — knowing which fund a transaction belongs to, why a reconciliation always has one stubborn line item, how a decades-old chart of accounts actually works — the stakes are higher than a simple staffing gap.

The numbers behind the wave

Nearly 38% of the local government workforce is expected to retire within the next five years, according to workforce research cited by the Washington State Association of Counties. The median age of local government employees is 45, and nearly half are over 50. Nationally, the Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 738,000 open job vacancies across federal, state, and local government agencies as of December 2025 — and 46% of public-sector HR managers say the largest wave of retirements is still ahead of them, not behind them, according to MissionSquare Research Institute's 2025 State and Local Government Workforce Survey.

Despite how predictable this trend is, most agencies aren't structurally ready for it. Only 13% of state and local governments have a formal succession-planning process in place — barely up from 12% a decade ago, per MissionSquare's research. That means in a majority of finance and HR departments, when a longtime employee retires, so does a working understanding of how that department actually runs.

Finance and accounting are especially exposed

Government finance offices are feeling this earlier and harder than many other departments. The accounting profession as a whole is aging out faster than it's being replenished: the average age of a CPA partner in the U.S. is now 52–53, first-time CPA exam candidates dropped 33% between 2016 and 2021, and bachelor's degree completions in accounting fell another 7.8% from 2021 to 2022, according to AICPA trend data cited by government accounting firm MGO. Public-sector employers are competing for a shrinking pool of accounting talent against private-sector salaries they typically can't match — all while new governmental accounting standards (like GASB 87 and GASB 96) make the job itself more technical than it was a decade ago.

What agencies are doing about it

There's no single fix, but a few practical responses are showing up across the sector:

  • Modernizing HR systems to get better visibility into who's eligible to retire and when, so hiring and cross-training can start before someone walks out the door — not after.
  • Investing in structured cross-training so critical processes like payroll runs, bank reconciliations, and month-end close don't depend on one person's memory.
  • Widening the hiring funnel by focusing job postings on demonstrated skills rather than degree requirements alone, to reach candidates who wouldn't have applied under older criteria.
  • Leaning on software to absorb institutional knowledge that used to live only in someone's head — standardized workflows, built-in approval chains, and audit trails that make a process legible to whoever is running it next.

That last point is where finance and ERP systems genuinely earn their keep. A system that encodes your agency's approval chains, fund structures, and reporting requirements directly into its workflows doesn't just make day-to-day work faster — it means a new hire isn't starting from a blank page when a 20-year employee retires. The knowledge is in the system, not just in someone's head.

The bottom line

The retirement wave facing local government isn't a surprise anymore — it's been forecast for years, and it's now arriving. Agencies that treat it as a reason to document processes, cross-train staff, and invest in systems that don't depend on any one person will come out the other side in far better shape than those that wait for the gap to show up in a missed deadline or a failed audit.