About GS Pay Tables

What this is

GS Pay Tables publishes the federal General Schedule pay tables with what the official tables do not show: what each salary is worth after local prices, where the statutory ceiling quietly stops raises, and which counties belong to which locality.

Where the numbers come from

Pay figures come from the Office of Personnel Management's published salary tables. Rather than copying them, we recompute every rate from the nationwide base table and the locality percentage, apply the statutory ceiling, and then compare the result against the published figure — all 8,700 of them. If a single cell disagrees by a dollar, the site does not publish.

Price levels are Regional Price Parities from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The price index used here describes 2024, two years before the 2026 pay tables. Metropolitan boundaries do not line up exactly with locality boundaries, so the nearest metropolitan area is used as a proxy and named on each locality page.

The sources of the pay tables, each linked to where it is published:

• OPM, 2026 General Schedule pay tables (every locality)
• OPM, 2026 locality pay area definitions
• OPM, 2026 pay tables for law enforcement officers
• Bureau of Economic Analysis, Regional Price Parities by state and metro area
• Census Bureau, 2020 ZIP Code Tabulation Area to county relationship files
• 5 U.S.C. 5304, locality-based comparability payments
• 5 CFR part 531, subpart F: locality payments
• 5 CFR 531.405: waiting periods for step increases
• 5 U.S.C. 5542: overtime rates
• 5 CFR 550.113: how title 5 overtime is computed
• 5 CFR 551.513: overtime for employees covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act
• 5 CFR 550.185: law enforcement availability pay
• Executive Order 14368, the 2026 pay schedules (Federal Register)

The locality, state, grade and pay raise pages also draw on OPM’s General Schedule tables of earlier years, the Federal Salary Council’s memos and the President’s Pay Agent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics for the national median wage, and consumer prices), OPM Federal Workforce Data, OPM’s hourly, law enforcement and special rate tables, the National Finance Center pay calendar, the Department of Defense instruction on Geneva Conventions identification cards, and congressional documents and laws; each is linked where it is used and described, with its limits, on the methodology page.

How this site is made

The tables are generated by code. Every pay rate, rank and county list on this site is produced by a program from the machine-readable files OPM, the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Census Bureau publish, rather than retyped. Facts about pay raises — the dates of letters and orders and the percentages they set — are entered from the documents the pay raise page links to.

The text was drafted with AI assistance. The explanations were written with the help of AI tools, and the sentences that repeat across similar pages are templates into which the code puts each page’s own numbers and names.

The checks are automated. Before anything is published, ninety-two automated checks run: the first recomputes all 8,700 pay rates from OPM’s base table and compares each with the figure OPM published, and the others read the finished pages for contradictions, missing areas, broken links, mismatched dates and wording that has had to be corrected before. If any check fails, nothing is published. Errors that get past them are corrected on the page and listed on the corrections page.

Where a number rests on an approximation rather than a published value — the price level of a locality is the clearest case — the page says so on the page, not in a footnote.

GS Pay Tables is published by BiLingoPlus LLC, a Wyoming company, and author credit belongs to it. There are no invented expert personas here and no bylines: nothing on this site is an opinion that would need one. What can be checked instead is the method, and it is set out in full on the methodology page: every source, the order of the arithmetic as the statute sets it, and the checks that stop publication when they fail.

Corrections

If a figure here is wrong, say which page and what you expected. Corrections are made against the source data, not against the page, and each one is listed with its date on the corrections page.

What this is not

This is an independent reference, not a government service and not financial or employment advice. For an official figure, go to OPM. For your own pay, go to your HR office — special rates, agency systems and individual circumstances all change the answer.