2026 editionEffective January 202658 locality pay areasData last changed 2026-08-25

Virginia GS pay scale, 2026

3 different locality pay areas cover Virginia, and the same GS-12 step 5 is paid anywhere from $102,951 to $116,071 depending on nothing but which county the building sits in.

Locality pay areas

3covering federal duty stations in Virginia.

Spread within the state

$13,120between the best-paid and worst-paid area here, at GS-12 step 5. Same grade, same step, same state.

Goes furthest here

$108,286of purchasing power in Richmond, VA — which is not the best-paid area in the state.

Against Rest of U.S.

+$14,628is what the best-paid area in Virginia adds over the $101,443 paid outside every named area.

Which areas cover Virginia, and what each pays

Rates are GS-12 step 5 in 2026. The last column is how many counties of this state each area covers.

Locality pay area	Locality pay	On paper	Prices	What it buys	Counties here
Washington-Baltimore-Arlington, DC-MD-VA-WV-PA	33.94%	$116,071	108.9	$106,601	25
Richmond, VA	22.28%	$105,967	97.9	$108,286	24
Virginia Beach-Norfolk, VA-NC	18.8%	$102,951	97.9	$105,115	18

The spread is $13,120 a year on an identical grade and step. Locality pay is set from what private employers in each region pay for comparable work, so an area with a strong private labor market pays more — and an area with expensive housing does not, unless the two happen to coincide.

Which is why the best-paid area in Virginia is not the one where the salary goes furthest. Washington-Baltimore-Arlington, DC-MD-VA-WV-PA writes the biggest paycheck at $116,071; Richmond, VA pays $105,967 and leaves you $1,686 better off once local prices are counted.

Every grade at step 5 in Virginia

Annual rates in U.S. dollars. Cells marked ▲ have been cut to the $197,200 statutory ceiling.

Grade	Washington-Baltimore-Arlington	Richmond	Virginia Beach-Norfolk
GS-1	34,274	31,290	30,400
GS-2	37,313	34,065	33,095
GS-3	42,063	38,401	37,308
GS-4	47,215	43,105	41,878
GS-5	52,825	48,226	46,854
GS-6	58,884	53,758	52,228
GS-7	65,435	59,739	58,039
GS-8	72,464	66,156	64,273
GS-9	80,041	73,073	70,994
GS-10	88,138	80,465	78,175
GS-11	96,843	88,412	85,896
GS-12	116,071	105,967	102,951
GS-13	138,024	126,008	122,422
GS-14	163,104	148,905	144,668
GS-15	191,850	175,149	170,164

Each area has its own full table of 150 rates; follow the links above. To put your own grade and step against any of them, use the pay calculator, which will also find your area from a ZIP code.

Which one applies to you?

Your duty station decides it — the place you physically report to, not where you live and not where your agency is headquartered.

Locality pay areas are defined as lists of counties, and county lines rarely follow anything a person would notice. A house on one side of a line and an office on the other are paid by the office. Telework arrangements have their own rules and can change which area applies, so confirm with your servicing human resources office rather than assuming.

A few military installations are assigned by OPM to a different area than the county around them: the base gate can be a pay boundary. Each area page lists its counties in full.

What a move inside Virginia is actually worth

Transfers between areas in the same state look like a raise on the offer letter. Here is how much of each one survives contact with local prices.

Richmond, VA to Washington-Baltimore-Arlington, DC-MD-VA-WV-PA: $10,104 more on paper, $-1,686 more after prices — about -17% of what it looks like.
Virginia Beach-Norfolk, VA-NC to Washington-Baltimore-Arlington, DC-MD-VA-WV-PA: $13,120 more on paper, $1,485 more after prices — about 11% of what it looks like.
Virginia Beach-Norfolk, VA-NC to Richmond, VA: $3,016 more on paper, $3,171 more after prices — about 105% of what it looks like.

The percentage is the part of the headline increase that still buys something once the difference in what things cost is taken out. Where it is small, the move is a change of address rather than a change of income; where it is large, it is a genuine raise. Neither is visible on a pay table.

Two things this does not include, and both can matter more than the figures above. State and local income tax is not modelled here at all. Nor is housing tenure: a mortgage signed years ago, or a house owned outright, changes the arithmetic in a way no published price index can see.

Cities named in the Virginia pay areas

OPM names each area after its principal cities. These are the ones that appear in the areas covering Virginia.

Washington
Baltimore
Arlington
Richmond
Virginia Beach
Norfolk

The list is a label rather than a boundary. An area reaches well past the city limits of the places it is named after, and plenty of towns nobody would associate with any of them are paid at the same rate. What decides it is the county.

Some of these cities are not in Virginia at all: an area named after a city in a neighboring state can still reach across the line and cover counties here. That is the point of the whole system — pay follows labor markets, and labor markets ignore state borders.

How Virginia sits against the rest of the country

Of the 58 locality pay areas in the General Schedule, 4 pay more at GS-12 step 5 than the best-paid area in Virginia.

The areas covering this state account for 67 named counties of the 920 that OPM lists across the whole system. Every county not on one of those lists falls into Rest of U.S., which is why a state can contain both a named area and large stretches paid at the floor rate.

Comparing states directly is less useful than it looks. Areas cross state lines: several reach into three or more states at once, and an employee moving between two of those states inside the same area sees no change in pay whatsoever. The unit of the system is the area, not the state, and the national ranking is the honest way to read it.

What a state page is good for is the question that brings people here: if a federal job in this state comes up, what is it likely to pay, and how much does the answer depend on exactly where the building is. For Virginia the answer is above.

Where else these areas reach

Locality pay areas are lists of counties, and county lists ignore state borders entirely.

Washington-Baltimore-Arlington, DC-MD-VA-WV-PA covers 25 counties in Virginia and also reaches into District of Columbia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, West Virginia. A federal employee moving between those states inside this area sees no change in pay at all.
Richmond, VA lies entirely within Virginia: it covers 24 counties here and nowhere else.
Virginia Beach-Norfolk, VA-NC covers 18 counties in Virginia and also reaches into North Carolina. A federal employee moving between those states inside this area sees no change in pay at all.

This is the part that surprises people transferring. A state line looks like a boundary and usually is one for tax, licensing and a dozen other things. For federal locality pay it is nothing: what matters is whether the county your duty station sits in appears on the list, and lists routinely span several states.

It also means the cost of living on either side of such a border can differ while the pay does not — which is one more reason the figure worth watching is not the salary but what the salary buys.