Annual Survey of Employment and Payroll estimates the number of federal, state, and local government employees and their gross payrolls. In the past two years, we developed the Decision - based method to estimate the survey total. In this paper, we discuss some small area challenges when we estimate the survey total at the functional level of government units such as airport, public welfare, hospitals, etc. First, we introduce the synthetic estimation and modified direct estimators. Then, we modified the composite estimation as a weighted average between modified direct estimation and synthetic estimation. Finally, we evaluate these methods by using the 2007 Census of Governments: Employment Component.