Civil Servant Salary Increases Are Finally Coming. Here Are the Exact Numbers for Every Pay Grade

The Office of Personnel Management discreetly posted the new salary tables to its website along with a memo that read, as OPM memos often do, like it was written by someone who had done this numerous times. The notice arrived late in the evening, as these things usually do. a general increase of 1%. Pay for localities is frozen. an effective date of January 11. The answer had finally arrived for the approximately two million federal employees who keep checking the OPM page every December, and it was less than many had anticipated.

strolling through the federal buildings’ cafeterias in downtown Washington, D.C. You could sense the conversation changing over the past few weeks. Not in a dramatic manner. Just as coworkers quickly calculate what 1% looks like on a GS-9 step 5 paycheck after taxes and the standard health premium by comparing notes next to the coffee maker. The answer ranges from fifty to seventy dollars more per pay period, depending on the area. beneficial but not revolutionary.

The locality freeze is perceived by federal employees as hurting more than the small base pay increase. After all, a GS-13 in San Francisco takes home significantly more than a GS-13 in rural Mississippi due to locality adjustments. For many, keeping those percentages at 2025 levels while rent contracts and grocery aisles continue to be affected by inflation feels like a covert pay cut disguised as fiscal restraint. Investors may refer to it as cost containment. More bluntly, federal employees refer to it as falling behind.

Once you sit with the numbers, they become easier to understand. The entry of a GS-1 step 1 goes to about $22,200 base prior to locality. The cost of a GS-7 step 1 is approximately $42,300. The workhorse rate for mid-career analysts and project managers in almost all agencies, the GS-13 step 1, rises to roughly $98,500 base. A GS-15 step 10 at the top of the table reaches about $172,000 before being capped by the Executive Schedule’s pay limitations, which is why a large number of senior employees in pricey areas essentially flatline at the cap.

The Senior Executive Service has a narrative of its own. The band has expanded in theory but remained stubbornly constrained in practice, with the minimum being pushed to $151,661 and the maximum remaining at $228,000 for those covered by certified performance systems. The official method is still performance-based adjustments, but anyone who has observed how slowly and unevenly SES pay decisions are made across agencies will attest to this.

It’s difficult to ignore the larger picture. In technical fields, such as cybersecurity, data science, and VA medical specialties, federal pay has long lagged behind private-sector compensation. The same 1% treatment is seen on Veterans Health Administration schedules, which raises subtle concerns about retention in an already overburdened organization. The 1 percent is also given to special base rates for law enforcement officers under the GL plan and wildland firefighters under the GW plan. This amount, when compared to the physical risks associated with those jobs, appears differently on a desk worker’s stub.

None of this is particularly dramatic. No crisis, no big speech. Just a table, a date, and a memo. The majority of federal employees will continue to process claims, inspect facilities, and write reports that no one outside the building reads. They will notice the change in their first paycheck of the new cycle. Nobody at OPM has addressed, and most likely cannot, whether 1 percent is sufficient to prevent the most gifted among them from moving toward the private sector.