How federal General Schedule pay works

Most white-collar civilian employees of the federal government are paid under the General Schedule, a single national pay structure set by statute and administered by the Office of Personnel Management. The 2026 tables are on this site under federal pay; this page explains how to read them.

Grades and steps

The schedule has 15 grades, GS-1 through GS-15, each with 10 steps. The grade reflects the difficulty and responsibility of the position and is assigned by classifying the job against OPM standards; the step reflects time in grade and performance. Each grade’s step 1 rate is set in the statute’s table, and the steps within a grade rise by roughly 3 percent each, so step 10 is about 30 percent above step 1. Adjacent grades overlap: a high step of one grade pays more than a low step of the next.

The base table

Section 5332 of title 5 sets the base rates. They are adjusted each January under section 5303 by a formula tied to the Employment Cost Index, unless the President proposes an alternative adjustment, which has been the normal practice; Congress may also set the figure in appropriations law. The adjustment is a percentage applied to every cell. The base table applies nowhere by itself: every employee’s pay is the base rate plus a locality payment.

Locality pay

Section 5304 adds a percentage to base pay that varies by locality pay area, intended to narrow the gap between federal and non-federal pay in that area as measured by BLS surveys. OPM publishes one table per area, 58 of them in 2026 including a “Rest of U.S.” table for everywhere not in a named area, with percentages ranging from about 17 percent to about 46 percent. An employee’s locality is determined by the official worksite, not by residence. The locality tables are what an offer letter quotes, and they are the ones this site will publish, each with its effective date.

Locality areas are defined by county and generally follow metropolitan statistical areas, with additions. They do not match the OEWS metro areas exactly, so a GS locality table and an OEWS metro table for the same city cover slightly different ground.

Moving through the schedule

Within-grade increases advance an employee one step at a time: after 52 weeks at steps 1 through 3, 104 weeks at steps 4 through 6, and 156 weeks at steps 7 through 9, provided performance is acceptable. Quality step increases can be awarded for sustained high performance. Promotion to a higher grade places the employee at the step in the new grade that gives at least a two-step increase from the old rate. Many positions are advertised with a career ladder, for example GS-7/9/11, under which the employee is promoted annually to the next grade without competition.

Caps and special rates

Pay under the schedule, including locality, may not exceed the rate for level IV of the Executive Schedule, which caps the top steps of GS-15 in high-locality areas. Agencies may obtain special rate tables for occupations and locations where recruiting is difficult; these replace the regular rate and are published by OPM alongside the main tables. Law enforcement officers at GS-3 through GS-10 have their own higher base table.

Outside the GS

The Senior Executive Service, the Executive Schedule, the Foreign Service, the Federal Wage System for trade and craft jobs, and many agency-specific systems, among them the Veterans Health Administration’s physician pay and the financial regulators’ schedules, are not on the General Schedule. OPM publishes several of them and this site plans to carry those it does.

Comparing with OEWS

A GS rate is a rate for a grade and step, not a measured wage. The occupation tables here show what employers across the economy pay for the work, from the 10th to the 90th percentile; the GS table shows what a specific employer pays for a classified position. The two are comparable only after matching the position to an occupation, locating the worksite’s metro on the state page, and remembering that OEWS excludes benefits. The sister site FastCalc has a GS locality step calculator that applies the current tables to a chosen grade, step and area.