GS-15 pay scale and salary 2026

Who is on GS-15

GS-15 is the seventh-least common of the fifteen grades, with 52,288 employees in May 2026; the largest occupations are General Attorney (0905), Miscellaneous Administration and Program (0301) and Information Technology Management (2210), and the Department of Defense employs the most of them, 8,505.

63% of them are supervisors or managers, the highest share of any grade.

19% have reached step 10, the top of the grade, the highest share of any grade.

At every step of GS-15 an overtime hour pays exactly the ordinary hourly rate for an employee exempt from the Fair Labor Standards Act (the rule, and who it covers): overtime above the hourly rate of GS-10 step 1 is capped at one and a half times that rate, and a GS-15 is paid more than the cap from step 1.

The $197,200 statutory ceiling cuts 95 GS-15 rates in 37 of the 58 areas, from step 3 in San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland, CA, and holds step 10 in 37 of them: there the last step increases add nothing.

GS-15, the top grade: 4.1% of GS employees

52,288 of the 1,279,389 General Schedule employees in May 2026 are on GS-15, and the median full-time pay OPM publishes for GS-15 is the statutory ceiling itself, $197,200, 3.9 times the national median wage of $50,980 for all occupations.

The first step of GS-15 already doubles the U.S. median hourly wage

$60.56 to $78.73 an hour in base pay, from step 1 to step 10, and even step 1 with Rest of U.S. locality pay, $70.89, is 2.9 times the national median of $24.51 an hour.

Military equivalent of GS-15: O-6

Military grade O-6 — a Colonel in the Army, Air Force and Marine Corps, a Captain in the Navy and Coast Guard — is the rank DoD treats as equivalent to GS-15 on Geneva Conventions identification cards.

Above GS-15

GS-15 is the top of the General Schedule: there is no higher grade to be promoted to on it, and the Senior Executive Service above it is paid from a separate system. What each of the fifteen grades means is on the list of GS grades.