The staff from United Nations agencies in Geneva gather to protest against the drastic budget cuts and staff reductions affecting thousands of UN employees worldwide, in Geneva, Switzerland, 1 May 2025.
The US is pressing the UN to cut staff pay to ease its budget crisis. Unions in Geneva say compensation is being misrepresented, but other states are also warming to the idea.
Washington’s diplomatic mission in Geneva recently upped the pressure on the United Nations to review staff compensation, arguing it outstrips most national civil servant pay, including in the United States. UN staff unions dispute the claim, but some member states keen to keep the organisation’s biggest donor engaged appear receptive to Washington’s demands.
In a Facebook post from January, the US mission to the UN wrote that staff compensation and benefits, which make up 70 per cent of the UN budget, need to be reformed to “restore trust in member states taxpayers”, provide cost savings and boost funding for UN operations. The post further suggested that Geneva-based technical agencies could use some “common sense reforms” such as eliminating business class travel, as well as university tuition and health insurance benefits.
Excessive or not
In late 2025, Washington’s UN reform representative Jeff Bartos, addressing the organisation’s budget committee, highlighted the UN’s “wide” salary margins, or adjustments to US baselines upon which international staff pay is set. He said housing subsidies, education grants and tax exemptions were unlike anything their civil service counterparts received.
US accusations of excessive UN compensation are not new. Conservative think tanks have long rallied against staff costs even before Donald Trump’s first term in office. Still, remuneration for international staff has historically been determined under the Noblemaire principle, a concept inherited from the League of Nations and named after the French diplomat who helped establish it. The regime requires that salaries must be comparable to those in the member state with the highest-paid civil service, in order to attract talent. Since the UN’s creation, Washington has served as that benchmark.
Those salary levels are then adjusted upward to set the UN’s base pay, reflecting the higher cost of living in New York compared to Washington. At present, the margin set by the General Assembly ranges between 110 and 120 per cent of US federal pay, according to the International Civil Service Commission (ICSC), a UN technical body responsible for reviewing pay. UN agencies follow this system, while adapting salaries to duty stations. By contrast, salaries for locally-hired staff are determined according to the best prevailing conditions in the local labour market.
Ian Richards, president of the UN staff union in Geneva, rejects the US arguments. “US federal civil servants end up getting significantly more than UN staff when posted abroad”, when comparing packages, he maintains. That includes significant housing allowances of $95,000 for US staff stationed in Geneva, he says. “They get that on top of their pay. That’s not nothing.”
UN rental subsidies cover 80 per cent of housing costs above an employee’s individual threshold, based on salary and location. One mid-level professional told Geneva Solutions they received $1,800 (CHF 1,393) for a CHF6,000 three-bedroom flat outside Geneva. Richards notes that schooling allowances for UN staff are also "significantly less”.
UN compensation has been lower than that of other international organisations such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
But Eugene Chen, a non-resident advisor at the International Peace Institute and a former employee of both the UN and the US State Department, says that the stated 117 per cent pay margin is misleading. According to his analysis, base salaries set for UN headquarters in New York are actually at least 26 per cent higher than for US civil service employees also stationed in New York, and clearly higher than federal salaries in Washington.
Chen criticises UN staff unions for “cherry picking between the conditions of service, and salaries and benefits in different parts of the US government” to defend their own favourable conditions. The example of $95,000 housing subsidies for Geneva, is an “extreme outlier” within the foreign service, he says, that far exceeds allowances in other comparable duty stations – to defend their own favorable conditions.
The ICSC, meanwhile, “is very much lacking in transparency”, Chen says, making it very difficult from the outside to understand the methodologies used to come up with the remuneration scale.
Economic and political realities
In September, the ICSC is due to deliver to the UN General Assembly its latest periodic compensation review, launched in 2024. But the technical team, consisting of 15 members largely serving in their personal capacity, will have its work cut out in the months ahead. Member states also urged it to revisit the level of salary margins set above those of US Washington-based civil service staff.
Recently, Geneva-based UN staff unions hosted an online town hall for staff to discuss financial issues, including compensation, for which the General Assembly had ordered the review. Union leaders called on staff to participate in a regular cost-of-living survey, which will feed into salary adjustments and ensure accurate accounting of pay by the ICSC.
The appeal came after UN secretary general António Guterres, who has been leading the UN80 reform drive that has ushered in cost-cutting measures, including relocations and agency merger proposals, “made it clear he was not competent to decide on salaries”, and that the decision rests with member states and the ICSC, a western diplomat told Geneva Solutions, speaking on the condition of anonymity. The ICSC did not respond to a request for an interview.
Amid a widening gulf between the Trump administration and the global body, the diplomat said their delegation “tries to engage with the Americans, particularly on issues they support to keep them on board with UN issues,” they said. “We decided to work with them on this issue (of salaries) even though we are unaware of the Americans’ agenda.”
The European Union reportedly agreed with the US to cut the UN’s educational allowance of over $30,000 to university students up to the age of 25, according to Devex. Some employees who do not have children consider the support to be discriminatory.
The source added that other donor countries have also warmed to such cost-cutting measures amid rising domestic economic strains. They cited China, whose contributions have increased sharply in recent years, and other emerging economies. Russia, which provides just over two per cent of the UN’s budget, last year proposed to the UN’s budget committee a 10 to 20 per cent cut to staff salaries.
Bad faith
Guterres recently wrote to member states that the organisation is in “imminent financial collapse”, with some UN officials hinting that New York headquarters may be forced to shut down later this year. The organisation warned that it may have to cut spending by 15 per cent in 2026, entailing a loss of 2,600 jobs if member states did not pay their contributions. Last week, as Trump convened his Board of Peace last week, pledging $10 billion toward its Gaza fund, the US paid $160 million to the UN in outstanding dues – a fraction of the nearly $4bn it owes.
Read more: UN faces dark future if nations don’t act, says analyst ahead of high-level meet
Salaries and benefits are the largest cost drivers in the UN budgets, and steps must be taken to ensure that available funds are more efficiently used, says Chen, adding that “there is no level of cutting by the UN that would satisfy the US”. He argues that the ICSC compensation review should make sure that the overall package is “not a disincentive for people to join the UN”.
In private, some traditional donors acknowledge that pay cuts are not ideal, fearing that cutting compensation will decrease the influence they have within the UN as jobs become less appealing for staff from wealthy countries. “We still want to ensure that the number of our nationals in UN management prevails or improves,” another delegate said.
However, for many working in UN organisations in Geneva, Washington’s crusade against UN salaries is yet another form of bullying toward the multilateral system that US president Donald Trump has sharply defunded and regularly berated.
“They are not engaging or working in good faith,” says Séverine Deboos, president of the staff union at the International Labour Organization (ILO), about the US. The ILO shed 225 jobs in 2025, and has warned that it faces a “critical” cash flow as a result of funding cuts by the US and other western donors. “They are playing on the fact that they have been, up to now, the biggest contributor in order to bargain and influence on all issues.”
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