The 2027 federal pay raise

Status: not decided. As of 26 August 2026 the President had not sent Congress the alternative pay plan letter that sets the 2027 raise. The letter is due before 1 September 2026. Nothing is binding until an executive order is signed, which for the last five years has happened between 18 and 23 December.

Three different things get called "the raise"

Most of the confusion in this subject comes from mixing three states that look alike in a headline and are not alike at all. Here is where each one stands.

In force

2026: base pay up 1.0 percent, locality frozen

Executive Order 14368, signed 18 December 2025. Base rates rose 1.0 percent; locality percentages were held at their 2025 levels. The rates took effect on the first day of the first pay period beginning on or after 1 January 2026 — 11 January 2026 in practice. These are the numbers on this site, and they are the only ones that are law.

Announced

2027: nothing yet

The President may set aside the statutory formula by sending Congress an alternative pay plan, and the deadline for doing so is before 1 September. Every President has used that power every year since 1994. As of 26 August 2026 no such letter for 2027 had appeared on whitehouse.gov, in the Federal Register, or among the documents Congress publishes.

Proposed

2027: a budget with no civilian raise, and a bill that has not moved

The budget request published on 3 April 2026 contains no pay raise for civilian federal employees. Its only pay proposal is military: 7 percent for E-5 and below, 6 percent through O-3, 5 percent above that. Separately, the FAIR Act (H.R. 7480 and S. 3823, both introduced 10 February 2026) would give 3.1 percent to base pay and about 1 percent to locality. Both bills are sitting in committee. A budget request is a request and a bill is a bill; neither changes anyone’s pay.

If the raise is zero, does anything change in January?

For most people, yes — and this is the part that gets lost every time the word freeze appears in a headline. The annual adjustment moves the table. A step increase moves you down the table you are already on. They are separate authorities, and a freeze on one is not a freeze on the other.

Step increases run on time served, not on the calendar year: 52 weeks of creditable service to reach steps 2, 3 and 4, then 104 weeks for steps 5, 6 and 7, then 156 weeks for steps 8, 9 and 10, with performance at an acceptable level (5 CFR 531.405). When pay was frozen for 2011 and 2012, what froze was the table: OPM published it under the heading rates frozen at 2010 levels. Movement within the table is a different action entirely.

What a promotion is actually worth at your grade and step is set out on the promotion pages, and what your current cell pays in your area is on the calculator.

What the formula gives if nobody intervenes

There is a statutory default, and it is not a guess. Base pay rises by the increase in the Employment Cost Index — wages and salaries, private industry workers — for the twelve months ending in September, less half a percentage point, rounded to a tenth (5 U.S.C. 5303(a)). The measurement window closes fifteen months before the money moves, so the input is already known.

For January 2027 the window is September 2024 to September 2025. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported an increase of 3.6 percent. Subtract half a point and the formula gives 3.1 percent for base pay. The same arithmetic applied to the previous cycle gives the figure the Federal Salary Council itself published for 2026: an ECI of 3.8 percent, a base increase of 3.3 percent.

That is what the formula produces, not what anyone has decided. It has been set aside every year since 1994, which is why the letter matters more than the arithmetic.

Locality is not a formula in the same sense. The law asks it to close the gap between federal and non-federal pay in each labor market down to a residual 5 percent, and it never has: on the last published measurement the gap was 56.57 percent, closing it would have taken 49.11 percent, and what was actually paid was 25.54 percent. There is no published figure for what full locality would cost in 2027. For 2026 the President’s own letter put it at an average of 18.88 percent and 24 billion dollars in the first year — which is the plainest available statement of why the formula keeps getting set aside.

Base and locality are two levers, not one

Locality is a percentage applied to base pay, so the two interact in a way that catches people out. A frozen locality percentage does not mean frozen locality dollars — if base pay rises, the same percentage pays more. And the reverse: a frozen base freezes the locality dollars too, however generous the percentage looks. In 2026 base pay rose 1.0 percent and locality percentages did not move, so every locality payment in the country rose by exactly 1.0 percent and not a cent more.

The clearest proof of that is printed on the tables themselves. The area with the highest locality percentage in the country and the one with the lowest carry the same line at the top: total increase, 1 percent. A locality percentage that does not move adds nothing, however large it is.

Which percentage applies to you, and why it is a labor-market measure rather than a cost-of-living one, is set out in how locality pay works.

What the last four years actually did

Base and locality are announced separately in the President’s letter and fixed together in the executive order. The overall figure is the government-wide average, not anybody’s actual raise: what you get depends on your locality area.

When the answer arrives

Three dates decide this, and they arrive in the same order every year.

Before 1 September. The alternative pay plan letter goes to Congress. Recent ones landed on 31 August 2022, 31 August 2023, 30 August 2024 and 28 August 2025 — in practice, the last days of the month.

Early December. If the President sets a different level of locality pay, 5 U.S.C. 5304a requires that report at least a month before the payments would otherwise start. It is a separate deadline from the August one and it is often missed by commentators.

Mid to late December. The executive order. The last five were signed on 22 December 2021, 23 December 2022, 21 December 2023, 23 December 2024 and 18 December 2025. OPM publishes the tables within days, and this site rebuilds from them.

10 January 2027. New rates take effect on the first day of the first pay period beginning on or after 1 January — which is why the raise almost never shows up in the first paycheck of the year. For 2026 that date was 11 January.

The letter is not the last word

A President can announce one thing in August and be overruled before January. For 2019 a freeze was announced; Congress put a 1.9 percent raise into an appropriations act instead, and Executive Order 13866 was signed on 28 March 2019 — three months into the year, backdated. If you are reading this after the letter has gone out and the number in it disappoints, that precedent is the reason the subject stays open until the order is signed.

Check it yourself

Every claim on this page comes from one of these. Not one of them is this site.

• 5 U.S.C. 5303 — the annual adjustment and the alternative plan
• 5 U.S.C. 5304a — the alternative level of locality pay
• The 2026 alternative pay plan letter (House Document 119-87)
• Executive Order 14368, the 2026 pay schedules
• Executive Order 13866 — the 2019 raise, signed in March, backdated
• 5 CFR 531.405 — waiting periods for step increases
• OPM's own memo on the 2026 adjustments
• OPM salary tables — where the official numbers appear

This page is checked by hand, not by a clock. The date at the top is when a person last looked at the primary sources; the build refuses to publish if that date gets older than 40 days, so a stale status cannot quietly ship.