Autocrats rely on the public bureaucracy not only to govern, but also to minimize threats to their rule. The need to delegate to the bureaucracy creates the possibility that bureaucrats might defect instead of staying loyal to the regime. This paper examines the role of microlevel factors in conditioning loyalty in autocracies by developing an argument that loyalty depends on the bureaucrats’ career dependency on the regime. I thereafter test various implications of the argument by using novel data from a recent case of uncompetitive authoritarian elections. To that end, I collect and utilize a dataset with a measure of loyalty that is constructed by comparing official results with results reported by voters and with a measure of career dependency based on data on more than 2000 members of electoral commissions. Corroborating the argument, stronger career dependency corresponds with higher propensity of bureaucrats to stay loyal to the regime.