Many of the jobs lost appear to be from the bureaucracy's contract workforce.

The Australian Public Service employed about 15,000 temporary staff in June, or 9.8 per cent of employees, while it had about 18,000 non-ongoing staff a year earlier (about 11.5 per cent of the workforce).

Overall, 152,095 people were employed in the APS on June 30, compared to 155,771 last year.

The latest APS Statistical Bulletin says 57,569 public servants were based in the ACT, representing 37.9 per cent of the sector. That figure had remained "relatively consistent" over the decade, the report says.

It said the decline in public servants was "driven by annual declines in ongoing employees".

Meanwhile, the number of employees working part-time steadily increased from 12 per cent in 2007 to 16 per cent this year.

APS Commissioner John Lloyd said a large portion of the staff reductions could be attributed to natural attrition.

"Reductions in non-ongoing staff are strongly related to the fact that there was both a federal election and a Census of Population and Housing during 2016," he said.

"This required a large temporary workforce to be employed across the Australian Electoral Commission and the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Many of these positions were no longer required as of June 2017."

But Community and Public Sector Union national secretary Nadine Flood said the job cuts were "another huge blow" to the quality and reliability of Commonwealth services.

"The government's ideological obsession with the size of the Commonwealth public sector is doing enormous damage, with thousands of permanent staff gone from places such as DHS, the Courts, CSIRO and Immigration and Border Force," she said.

"In other places they're trying to paper over the cracks by employing people through labour hire firms.

"The reality is that the size of the Commonwealth public sector should have grown along with Australia's population, providing essential public services as well as quality secure jobs for communities around the country, particularly in regional areas."

ACT Chief Minister Andrew Barr said the figures showed the Liberal government's "contempt for Canberra".

"The ACT government is focused on diversifying our economy and creating more jobs outside of the APS - that's why we're attracting companies like Singapore Airlines and Ikea, investing in infrastructure and growing our higher education sector," he said.

"Our ability to keep our economy out of recession, keep our unemployment rate at one of the lowest levels in the country and keep our population growing demonstrates that this approach is working."

Women made up 59 per cent of APS employees and the majority of all levels below executive level 2.

Men occupied the majority of top jobs but the proportion of women in senior executive service positions crawled from 36 per cent in 2008 to 43 per cent.

The top four agencies were the Department of Human Services (32,024 employees), the Australian Tax Office (20,625 employees), Defence (18,390 employees) and the Department of Immigration and Border Protection (13,799 employees).

Forty-six agencies had fewer than 250 employees.

with Markus Mannheim