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- States with no named area
2026 editionEffective January 202658 locality pay areasData last changed 2026-08-25
The 8 states with no named locality pay area
Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming contain no designated locality pay area at all. Every federal duty station in them is paid the Rest of U.S. rate, and geography inside those states changes federal pay by exactly nothing.
States affected
8of the 50, plus no part of the District of Columbia.The rate everywhere in them
$101,443for a GS-12 step 5 in 2026, at 17.06% above the nationwide base table.- Arkansas
- Louisiana
- Mississippi
- Montana
- North Dakota
- South Dakota
- Utah
- Wyoming
Why one page and not eight
Because there would be eight identical answers.
Everywhere else on this site, a page exists because it has something of its own to say: a percentage, a spread between areas, a ranking that reverses once prices are counted. For these states there is none of that. The rate is the same, the reasoning is the same, and the only thing that would differ between eight pages is the name at the top.
Publishing them anyway would add eight pages to the site and nothing to your knowledge. We would rather have one page that is worth reading.
What being outside every named area means
Rest of U.S. is not a leftover category. It is the rate for every federal duty station in the country outside the 57 named areas, and it is the floor of the whole system.
Being outside a named area is not a statement about how rural a place is. Rest of U.S. covers plenty of substantial cities: being a metropolitan area is not the test, being a designated locality pay area is, and that list is decided by the Federal Salary Council and the President rather than by population.
The practical consequence inside these 8 states is worth stating plainly. Moving across the state for a federal job changes your commute, your rent and your neighbors. It changes your federal salary by nothing at all. A GS-12 step 5 is paid $101,443 in every county of every one of them.
That also cuts the other way, and in your favor more often than people expect. Locality pay is set from what private employers in a region pay, not from what living there costs — so an area with a modest percentage in a place where things are cheap can leave you better off than a high percentage in an expensive one. On our national ranking, sorted by what the salary actually buys, several low-percentage areas finish near the top.
Could that change?
Yes, and when it does the effect is immediate and large.
New locality pay areas are added occasionally. The Federal Salary Council reviews candidate areas against the criteria and recommends additions; the recommendation is not binding, and the process takes years. But a duty station moving out of Rest of U.S. into a newly named area gains the whole difference between the two percentages overnight, with no promotion and no step increase involved.
The number of areas has grown from 48 to 54 to 58 over the years, so this is not hypothetical. It is also why this site reads the list of areas from OPM afresh on every build rather than keeping a fixed one: a hardcoded list would silently miss a new area, and the people in it are exactly the people who would most want to know.
Where to look next
The Rest of U.S. page has the full table: all 15 grades, all 10 steps, and what each rate is worth against national average prices.
If you are weighing a job in one of these states against one elsewhere, the comparison pages put Rest of U.S. against each of the highest-paying areas and work out how cheap a place would have to be for the lower rate to come out ahead. For a specific grade and step in a specific place, the calculator will find the area from a ZIP code.
And if your duty station is in one of these states but near a border, check the county rather than assuming. Named areas cross state lines freely, and a county on the edge of one of these states can belong to an area named after a city in the next state along.