About GS Pay Tables

What this is

GS Pay Tables publishes the federal General Schedule pay tables with what the official tables do not show: what each salary is worth after local prices, where the statutory ceiling quietly stops raises, and which counties belong to which locality.

Why we publish it

The official tables say what each grade and step pays in each locality pay area. Someone weighing a federal job or a transfer usually needs more than that: what the salary buys where they would live, how far apart two areas really are, and how the rate has moved. This site puts those answers next to the official figures, recomputed from OPM’s files and checked against them, so that the comparison does not have to be assembled by hand from several government sources.

Where the numbers come from

Pay figures come from the Office of Personnel Management's published salary tables. Rather than copying them, we recompute every rate from the nationwide base table and the locality percentage, apply the statutory ceiling, and then compare the result against the published figure — all 8,700 of them. If a single cell disagrees by a dollar, the site does not publish.

Price levels are Regional Price Parities from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The price index used here describes 2024, two years before the 2026 pay tables. Metropolitan boundaries do not match locality pay areas exactly, so each area takes the price level of the metropolitan area of its principal city, the first city in OPM’s name for the area; that metro area is named on the area’s page, beside any other metro area the name takes in. Alaska and Hawaii, whose areas are the whole state, take BEA’s price level for the state.

The sources of the pay tables, each linked to where it is published:

• OPM, 2026 General Schedule pay tables (every locality)
• OPM, 2026 locality pay area definitions
• OPM, 2026 pay tables for law enforcement officers
• Bureau of Economic Analysis, Regional Price Parities by state and metro area
• Census Bureau, 2020 ZIP Code Tabulation Area to county relationship files
• 5 U.S.C. 5304, locality-based comparability payments
• 5 CFR part 531, subpart F: locality payments
• 5 CFR 531.405: waiting periods for step increases
• 5 U.S.C. 5542: overtime rates
• 5 CFR 550.113: how title 5 overtime is computed
• 5 CFR 551.513: overtime for employees covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act
• 5 CFR 550.185: law enforcement availability pay
• Executive Order 14368, the 2026 pay schedules (Federal Register)

The locality, states, grade and pay raise pages also draw on OPM’s General Schedule tables of earlier years, the Federal Salary Council’s memos and the President’s Pay Agent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics for the national median wage, and consumer prices), OPM Federal Workforce Data, OPM’s hourly, law enforcement and special rate tables, the National Finance Center pay calendar, the Department of Defense instruction on Geneva Conventions identification cards, and congressional documents and laws; each is linked where it is used and described, with its limits, on the methodology page.

The per diem page is the one page here that is not about pay: it publishes GSA’s travel per diem rates for the continental United States from GSA’s own rate files, read and checked the same way.

How this site is made

Where the figures come from. Every pay rate, rank and county list on this site is computed from the files OPM, the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Census Bureau publish, not retyped by hand. Facts about pay raises — the dates of letters and orders and the percentages they set — are entered from the documents the pay raise page links to.

The text was written with the help of AI tools. Its figures come from the official files and are checked automatically every time the site is built, as listed below. Each locality and grade page shows that area’s or grade’s own figures.

What is checked, and how. Before anything is published, one hundred and one automated checks run on the whole site, and if any one fails, nothing is published:

• all 8,700 pay rates are recomputed from OPM’s base table and each area’s percentage, in the order the law sets, and compared with the figure in OPM’s own file for that area, to the dollar;
• the hourly rule is compared with OPM’s published hourly tables of four areas, cell by cell, and the law enforcement rates with OPM’s published law enforcement tables of five;
• every GSA per diem rate is compared with the row in GSA’s own rate file, and the trip calculator’s shipped code is run against an independent calculation;
• the history of each area, the council’s estimates, the federal job counts and the four articles on this site’s data are recomputed, by code separate from the code that wrote the pages, from the tables this site extracted from the archived OPM tables, the council’s memos and the Bureau of Labor Statistics files, and the price comparison, with its split into rent, goods, utilities and other services, from OPM’s and BEA’s own files;
• the finished pages are read for broken links, contradictions, missing areas, mismatched dates, rules stated without the date they end, and wording that has had to be corrected before, and the tables are measured in a browser at phone width, so that the column of names never hides the figures.

Each check is also run against a deliberately broken copy of its input, and has to stop the build. Errors that get past the checks are corrected where the page is built from, so every page that carries the figure changes with it, and each is listed on the corrections page.

Where a number rests on an approximation rather than a published value — the price level of a locality is the clearest case — the page says so on the page, not in a footnote.

Who publishes it

GS Pay Tables is published by BiLingoPlus LLC, a limited liability company registered in the State of Wyoming, which is responsible for every page; its registered address is on the contact page. Pages carry no personal bylines, because nothing on them is a personal opinion: each figure is traceable to a public source, and the method is set out in full on the methodology page — every source, the order of the arithmetic as the statute sets it, and the checks that stop publication when they fail.

Corrections

If a figure here is wrong, say which page and what you expected. A correction is made where the page is built from, in the data or the rule that produced the figure, so every page that carries the figure changes with it; each one is listed with its date on the corrections page.

What this is not

This is an independent reference, not a government service and not financial or employment advice. For an official figure, go to OPM. For your own pay, go to your HR office — special rates, agency systems and individual circumstances all change the answer.