Human resources include overall knowledge, skills, abilities, creative opportunities, motivation and loyalty that a particular society or organization can use, but also an expression that denotes the amount of useful and valuable knowledge created in the process of upbringing, education, studying and gaining knowledge. In recent decades, human resource management has become an indispensable part of an organization. For public administration, there are details related to this profession as there are differences between public administration and private enterprises in their underlying goals and purposes. Human resources management in public administration distinguishes four models: political, administrative, managerial, and integral. They differ in their core values, the role of managers in the organization, the status of employees... As said, human resources management is conducted in a special way in public administration so that there are specific methods and instruments that, although still in development, correspond to its particulars. Some of these methods, which are explained in the paper, concern employee recruitment, motivation, promotion, employee development and so on. The payment system is one of the functions in this discipline that needs to be carefully and in detail analyzed to determine the best possible system, appropriate for a particular state and its administration. The salaries of civil servants today are determined by civil service legislation and collective contracts between trade unions and political authorities. The end of the paper takes a closer look at this function with an example of the public administration payment system in the Republic of Croatia.