Corrections to this site

Locality pages: Palm Bay, Burlington, Virginia Beach, Reno, Rochester, and those ranked by the swing of the pay gap between editions. The Palm Bay table gave 28.13 percent as the formula rate for pay in 2024, which is the Rest of U.S. target the memo assigned it, not a rate of its own. Burlington and Virginia Beach were listed as locality pay areas in the edition for pay in 2018, when the memo only recommended them. Reno and Rochester were said not to be listed in the editions for 2018 to 2022, which name them without a gap, and Reno, with four editions, was ranked by swing against areas with nine.

Now: Where a memo gives an area the Rest of U.S. target, Palm Bay and Corpus Christi alike, the table shows a dash and its caption says why; an edition that only recommends an area lists it as proposed; Reno and Rochester read “give it no gap”; swings are ranked among the 56 areas with a gap in all nine editions.

The 15 grade pages, /methodology/. The military grade table cited only Table 2 of DoD Instruction 1000.01, though the officer titles are from its Table 1 and the statement that the equivalence gives no rank or authority is from Enclosure 2, paragraph 4.b; the site’s own note that it is not a pay equivalence stood before the source and read as part of it. The table sat under the question about hourly pay.

Now: Each grade page answers “What military rank is GS-N equivalent to?” under its own heading, cites Tables 1 and 2 and paragraph 4.b, and adds its note after the source; the methodology page says what the instruction is for and what it does not cover.

/states/virginia/, /states/maryland/, /states/missouri/, /states/nevada/. The Virginia page called its 66 places on the Rest of U.S. rate “all other counties”; 16 of them are independent cities. These four state pages counted their independent cities as counties.

Now: The pages count counties and independent cities apart: in Virginia, 50 counties and 16 independent cities on the Rest of U.S. rate.

The 15 grade pages. The grade pages did not say which military grade a General Schedule grade corresponds to.

Now: Each gives the military grade, the warrant officer grades where there are any, the Geneva Conventions category and the officer titles that DoD Instruction 1000.01 sets beside it for identification cards, and says that this is not a pay equivalence.

The 38 state pages with more than one locality pay area. A state page gave each area’s pay and the number of the state’s counties it covers, but not which counties they are.

Now: Each lists the counties of the state in each area as OPM’s 2026 definitions give them, with the military installations OPM assigns, and the number of counties on the Rest of U.S. rate.

/compare/ and six former pair addresses; the Washington, DC, Los Angeles, New York, San Diego, San Jose and Houston locality pages. From 6 October the six former addresses that set an area against Rest of U.S. redirected to their pair on /compare/; search engines drop the part of an address after “#”, so for these searches they listed the top of /compare/ instead of the pair.

Now: They redirect to that area’s page, which now states the difference from Rest of U.S. at GS-12 step 5 and the price level at which the Rest of U.S. rate buys as much; the other fifteen pair addresses still lead to their pair on /compare/.

Nine locality pages (Birmingham, Corpus Christi, Des Moines, Fresno, Omaha, Reno, Rochester, San Antonio, Spokane). Each said that only some of the nine Federal Salary Council editions checked here include the area. The earlier editions list it in their research-area tables with a pay gap of its own, and Corpus Christi showed no formula rate in any edition.

Now: The table of editions shows those research-area gaps and says where the area is listed as what; the ranks of change and of swing between editions count them; Corpus Christi shows its own formula rate for pay in 2020 to 2022.

The 15 grade pages, /methodology/. Grade pages gave a median full-time “basic pay” without saying that OPM withholds the pay of 550,140 of the 1,279,389 General Schedule records, every Department of Defense record among them, and that the figure includes locality pay; GS-1 and GS-2 medians rested on 25 and 73 records.

Now: Each median says how many full-time employees it is taken from and what share of the grade that is, the label says locality pay is included, GS-1 and GS-2 carry no median, and the methodology page describes the withheld pay.

/how-locality-pay-works/, /locality/state-of-alaska/, /locality/state-of-hawaii/. Senate Report 110-456 was cited as the report on the law that replaced the Alaska and Hawaii cost-of-living allowance with locality pay.

Now: It is cited as the report on S. 3013, the 2008 bill that proposed the change; the change was enacted as sections 1911 to 1919 of Public Law 111-84.

/states/no-locality-area/, /how-locality-pay-works/. The pages said the list of locality pay areas is decided by the Federal Salary Council and the President.

Now: They say the President’s Pay Agent defines the areas (5 U.S.C. 5304(f)(1)) on the council’s recommendation.

/step-increase/. The page cited 5 CFR 532.417 for the Federal Wage System’s five steps and waits of 26, 78 and 104 weeks; that section refers to the law and does not state the waits.

Now: It cites 5 U.S.C. 5343(e), where the steps and the waits are set.

/law-enforcement/, /calculator/. The law enforcement page showed steps 1, 5 and 10 of the GL table only and no GL rate with locality pay, and the calculator worked out General Schedule rates only.

Now: The page shows all 80 GL rates with any area’s locality pay and a table of all 58 areas, checked against five of OPM’s published law enforcement tables; the calculator has a GL pay plan for grades 3 to 10.

The 58 locality pages, the 15 grade pages. Locality pages gave every rate a year only, and grade pages did not say what a grade pays an hour.

Now: Every locality page has the hourly and biweekly rate of all 150 cells (the annual rate divided by 2,087 hours, and that times 80), matching OPM’s hourly tables, and each grade page has an hourly column and answers whether the grade is a high one from OPM and BLS figures.

The 58 locality pages, /methodology/. Each locality page said the Federal Salary Council “has published a gap” for the area “in nine editions, the first for locality pay in 2018”. The council’s memos go back to 2003; nine is the number of editions this site has loaded.

Now: The pages speak of the editions checked here, the memos for pay in 2018 to 2026, and the methodology page says the memos go back to 2003 and that an area may appear in earlier ones.

The 58 locality pages, the 39 state pages, the 15 grade pages. The same paragraphs stood on every page of each kind with only the names and numbers changed: the same caveats under each table, a sentence on how the pay law’s formula has been set aside since 1994, and an example of a swinging estimate taken from one area (Laredo, TX) on every locality page.

Now: Each page carries its tables and only the sentences that single its own area or grade out, such as one of the five highest or lowest figures of a kind; how each source works and what it cannot show is on the methodology page, once, and the 1994 history on the pay raise page.

/. The home page had no General Schedule pay table: its first figure was the range of one cell, GS-12 step 5, across the areas.

Now: It opens with the full 2026 table, 15 grades by 10 steps, as base rates, with any area’s rates a choice away, the 2027 status from the pay raise tracker, and links to OPM’s official tables.

/states/no-locality-area/. The page advised checking whether a border county belongs to an area named after a city in the next state, although in OPM’s 2026 definitions no county of these eight states is in a named area.

Now: It says that no county of these states is on any named area’s county list and that no installation in them is assigned to one.

/how-locality-pay-works/. The page said the area that pays more runs into the ceiling first and that “over a career that can matter more than the difference in any single year”, as if the ceiling touched most careers.

Now: It says where the ceiling binds: 97 of the 8,700 cells, at the top of GS-15 and GS-14, in 37 of the 58 areas.

/contact/. The contact page asked anyone who wanted to quote or reproduce the site to write for permission, while the terms license the same text CC BY 4.0.

Now: It points to the CC BY 4.0 license in the terms: reuse with attribution and a link, no permission needed.

/promotion/ (then 14 separate promotion pages), the grade pages. Promotions from step 9 or step 10 were worked out as if the two step increases of the two-step rule could not go past step 10: GS-12 step 10 to GS-13 was shown as $614 more in base pay. Every pair was also said to need 52 weeks in grade, and a grade page said a promotion from GS-11 is worth about $14,356 (step 5 to step 5).

Now: Above step 10 the two step increases are added in dollars, as in OPM's own promotion examples (5 CFR 531.214): GS-12 step 10 to GS-13 is $6,676 more in base pay. Below GS-5 there is no time-in-grade minimum (5 CFR 300.604). GS-11 step 5 to GS-12 is worth $6,709 by the rule.

17 state pages. Seventeen state pages described the whole state as one locality pay area and left out the Rest of U.S. rate that applies to counties outside every named area. Tennessee was shown as entirely inside the Huntsville area, which covers one of its 95 counties.

Now: Rest of U.S. is a row on every state page where it applies, and the pay spreads quoted for those states changed with it.

Locality, state, comparison and grade pages; /methodology/. The Alaska and Hawaii pages carried text written for Rest of U.S. Forty locality pages said the steps of a grade are not evenly spaced, which is true only of GS-1 and GS-2. Negative differences were printed with the minus sign after the dollar sign on five comparison pages and nineteen state pages. The methodology said twenty-nine checks stop publication when there were forty.

Now: Each of these now says what the data shows; the number of checks on the methodology page is taken from the build itself.

The 58 locality pages, /methodology/. The methodology said the metropolitan area used for each locality's prices is named; it was not named on any page. It also said sixteen checks stop publication (there were twenty-nine) and that 920 counties lie in 57 areas (they lie in 55).

Now: Each locality page names the metropolitan area its price level was measured for, and the methodology states both counts as they are.

/pay-raise/, the 15 grade pages. For fifteen days after the President's 26 August letter proposing a freeze, the pay raise page said the 2027 raise had not been decided. The search descriptions of the grade pages gave the step 5 range as the range of the whole grade: GS-14 “$142,549 to $178,204”.

Now: The page leads with the proposed freeze. The grade range runs from step 1 in the lowest-paying area to step 10 in the highest-paying one: $125,776 to $197,200 for GS-14.