- All localities
- States
2026 editionEffective January 202658 locality pay areasData last changed 2026-08-25
GS pay scale by state
Locality pay areas do not follow state lines. Most states contain more than one, and the same grade and step can differ by tens of thousands of dollars inside a single state.
Why a state is not a pay area
The General Schedule knows nothing about states. It is built from 58 locality pay areas, and those are defined as lists of counties.
Some of those areas cover parts of several states at once: the Washington-Baltimore-Arlington area reaches into five, and a federal employee crossing from Maryland into Virginia inside it sees no change in pay at all. Others split a single state into pieces that are paid very differently — Texas contains six separate areas.
So a state page is a convenience, not a unit of the pay system. What it is good for is the question people actually have: if I take a federal job somewhere in this state, what am I likely to be paid, and how much does it depend on where exactly?
Where the answer changes most
In 24 states the answer depends heavily on the county. In the rest it barely depends at all.
Eight states contain no named locality pay area whatsoever: every federal duty station in them is paid the Rest of U.S. rate, and geography inside the state makes no difference. At the other extreme, California spans five areas and nearly twenty-five thousand dollars of difference on a single grade and step.
Each state page below says which case it is, names the areas, and adds the figure no other reference publishes: what each salary is worth once local prices are counted. In several states the best-paid area is not the one where the money goes furthest.
Why the spread inside a state can be large
Locality pay follows private labor markets, and those vary far more inside a state than most people expect.
An area is set at a percentage above the nationwide base table, and that percentage is derived from what private employers in the region pay for comparable work. A state containing both a major metropolitan labor market and a stretch of countryside will therefore contain both a high-percentage area and, in the countryside, the Rest of U.S. floor. The same grade and step, forty miles apart, on two different rates.
This is also why the boundaries look arbitrary from inside a car. They are county lists, drawn to follow economic areas rather than anything visible: a river, a ring road or a county line can be a pay boundary, and nothing on the ground marks it.
One consequence catches people out when they transfer. A move to a higher-percentage area inside the same state reads as a raise on the offer letter, but the regions where private pay is high are usually also the regions where things cost more. How much of the increase survives that is exactly what these pages calculate, and on some moves the answer is almost none of it.
What these pages do not cover
The General Schedule, and only the General Schedule.
Roughly a third of federal employees are paid from other systems: the Federal Wage System for trades and labor positions, the Senior Executive Service, Title 38 medical positions at the Department of Veterans Affairs, and several demonstration projects. Law enforcement officers at grades GS-3 through GS-10 receive higher locality rates than the ordinary table shows, and special rate tables cover occupations where recruitment is difficult — where one applies, the employee receives the higher of the special rate and the locality rate, never both.
Every figure here is also gross pay, before deductions. State income tax in particular can matter as much as the locality difference: several states levy none at all, and a comparison that ignores it is incomplete in a way we would rather name than paper over.