58 locality pay areasPage last changed 2026-10-07

What is locality pay? How GS locality pay works in 2026

Locality pay is the percentage added to General Schedule base pay in each of the 58 locality pay areas to bring federal salaries closer to what non-federal employers pay for the same work in that labor market: in 2026 it runs from 17.06% in Rest of U.S. to 46.34% in San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland, CA, counts as basic pay for retirement, the Thrift Savings Plan, life insurance and overtime, and is taxed like the rest of the salary.

It is a labor-market adjustment, not a cost-of-living one

Locality pay follows what private employers in the region pay for comparable work, not what living there costs.

Locality pay exists because of the Federal Employees Pay Comparability Act of 1990, which set out to close the gap between federal and non-federal salaries in the same labor market. The comparison is against what other employers in that region pay for similar work, measured by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It is not a measure of what housing, food or childcare cost there.

The two usually travel together — strong private labor markets tend to be expensive places — but not in the same proportion, and not reliably. An area with a strong labor market pays more; an area with expensive housing does not, unless the two coincide. In 2026 the adjustment runs from 17.06% to 46.34%, and the gap between pay and prices is large enough to turn the ranking of the highest-paying areas upside down. That is the comparison every locality page on this site makes.

How this site compares what a salary buys

The salary is divided by the local price level. Nothing more elaborate than that.

The price level is the Regional Price Parity published by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, where 100 is the national average and lower is cheaper. A salary divided by it is what the salary would have to be, at average U.S. prices, to buy the same things — a figure that can be compared across the country. Pages show the index to one decimal place and compute from the three the BEA publishes, so recomputing from the printed figure lands a few dollars away.

Two limits apply wherever the figure appears. The price index used here describes 2024, two years before the 2026 pay tables. Metropolitan boundaries do not match locality pay areas exactly, so the nearest metropolitan area stands in for each one and is named on its page. A third follows from them: a gap of less than one percent of the salary is inside the error of the price data. The comparison tool and the calculator call such a pair the same. The rankings still order every area by its exact figure, so two neighbors in a ranking can be closer than that; the table of neighbors on each locality page shows the figures.

Two things are left out on purpose, and either can matter more than the figure. State and local income tax is not modeled: several states levy none and others take a real share. Nor is housing tenure — the index describes what things cost now, and a mortgage signed years ago, or a house owned outright, changes the arithmetic in a way no published index can see. So when a page says how much of a raise is left after a move, it means what still buys something once the difference in prices is taken out, and no more than that.

Your duty station decides, not your address

Locality follows the official duty station — the place you are assigned to report to — not where you live and not where your agency is headquartered.

Living in a cheaper county nearby does not reduce your pay, and living in an expensive one does not raise it: if you report to a building in one county and live in the next, the building decides. Remote and telework arrangements are the common source of confusion, because the rules depend on how the position is formally documented rather than on where you happen to open a laptop. When it matters, confirm with your servicing human resources office.

Each locality pay area is a list of counties, and county lines rarely follow anything a person would notice: a river, a ring road or an unmarked line can be a pay boundary. The cities in an area’s name are its label, not its boundary — the list usually reaches far past them, and the size of a city has nothing to do with its rate. A few military installations are assigned by OPM to a different area than the county around them, so a base gate can be a pay boundary too.

The lists ignore state borders. Several areas reach into three or more states, an area named after a city in one state can cover counties in the next, and a move between two states inside the same area does not change pay — while the cost of living on either side of the line may differ. The unit of the system is the area, not the state.

What Rest of U.S. means

It is the rate for every duty station that is not inside one of the 57 named areas, and the floor of the whole system.

Rest of U.S. is defined by exclusion: it has no list of counties of its own, because it is everything the other lists leave out. It is not a category for small towns. Plenty of substantial cities are in it, because being a metropolitan area is not the test — being a named locality pay area is, and those areas are defined by the President’s Pay Agent (5 U.S.C. 5304(f)(1)) on the recommendation of the Federal Salary Council, not by population. Most states contain both named counties and stretches paid at this rate.

It is also the baseline every other area is measured against: when people talk about the size of locality pay, the difference from Rest of U.S. is what they mean. Because it is drawn from every state at once, no single price index describes it, so this site gives it no purchasing-power figure rather than an invented one. And telework does not automatically keep anyone on this rate, or move them off it: what counts is the duty station recorded on the paperwork.

How a rate is built, and in what order

Base rate, times one plus the locality percentage, rounded to the dollar, and only then checked against the ceiling.

Every General Schedule grade has ten steps. The base rate comes from one nationwide table, and the locality percentage of the duty station is applied on top of it. The tables OPM publishes for each locality are final rates, not base rates awaiting an adjustment, so adding the percentage to one of them counts it twice.

The order matters at the top of the schedule. Applying the ceiling before rounding rather than after gives different figures for capped cells, which is one reason published numbers occasionally disagree between reference sites. Every figure on this site was recomputed in the legal order and matched the official table cell by cell. Two derived rates follow the same discipline: the hourly rate is the annual rate divided by 2,087 hours, rounded to the cent, and the biweekly rate is that hourly rate times 80 — not the annual rate divided by 26, which gives a different and wrong answer.

From GS-3 up, the steps of a grade are evenly spaced: each one adds the same amount, one within-grade increase, which is $2,549 at GS-12 in 2026. GS-1 and GS-2 are the exception, and GS-1 badly so: its steps rise by $757 at first and by only $31 from step 8 to step 9. At the bottom of the schedule, read the step from the table rather than extrapolating it.

Does basic pay include locality pay?

For retirement, the Thrift Savings Plan, life insurance and premium pay, yes: the locality rate counts as basic pay for each of them.

The law says a locality payment “shall be considered to be part of basic pay for purposes of retirement under chapter 83 or 84, as applicable, life insurance under chapter 87, and premium pay under subchapter V of chapter 55”, and that it “shall be paid in the same manner and at the same time as the basic pay” of the employee (5 U.S.C. 5304(c)(2)). OPM’s regulation lists the purposes one by one (5 CFR 531.610): retirement deductions, contributions and benefits under chapters 83 and 84 of title 5 — the Civil Service Retirement System, the Federal Employees Retirement System and the Thrift Savings Plan, which is part of chapter 84, so TSP percentages are taken of the rate with locality pay; life insurance premiums and benefits; overtime and other premium pay, including the caps on it; severance pay; advances in pay; recruitment, relocation and retention incentives; and awards set as a percentage of pay. The high-3 average salary a CSRS or FERS annuity is computed from is therefore an average of rates with locality pay.

Is locality pay taxed?

Yes. Locality pay is part of the salary and is taxed like the rest of it.

It is paid with base pay, in the same paycheck, so federal income tax and the payroll taxes that apply to the employee are withheld from it as from the base rate, and state income tax applies where the state has one. The Senate committee report on S. 3013, the 2008 bill that proposed replacing the tax-free cost-of-living allowance of Alaska, Hawaii and the territories with locality pay, put it plainly: “Unlike a COLA, locality pay is taxed and considered part of base pay” (Senate Report 110-456). The change itself was enacted in 2009, as sections 1911 to 1919 of Public Law 111-84 (OPM, nonforeign areas), and from 2010 to 2012 the allowance was reduced as locality pay was phased in, the take-home-pay protection the 2008 report had described. The Alaska and Hawaii pages give the figures.

Steps, and the waiting periods between them

One year, two years, three: eighteen years from step 1 to step 10 without a promotion.

Within a grade, step increases come on a fixed schedule as long as performance is acceptable: one year each for steps 2 through 4, two years each for steps 5 through 7, and three years each for steps 8 through 10.

A promotion to a higher grade restarts that clock, which matters when a promotion lands shortly before a step increase would have. Which step the promotion itself lands on is set by a separate rule, worked out for every grade and step by the promotion calculator; the date of the next step, with leave without pay and quality step increases, by the step increase calculator.

The ceiling

No General Schedule rate may exceed Level IV of the Executive Schedule: $197,200 in 2026.

Where the formula would produce more, the payable rate is cut back to that figure. In the highest-paying localities this happens before the top of the schedule, and inside that band a step increase adds nothing: the formula produces a bigger number, the law cuts it back, and the payslip does not move. Locality pages mark exactly which of their 150 cells are affected.

It binds at the top of the schedule only: 97 of the 8,700 cells of the 2026 tables are held to it, all of them at GS-15 from step 3 up or GS-14 from step 9 up, in 37 of the 58 areas. For someone on or headed for those cells, two offers in two areas can look like a clear win on paper while the higher-paid one has already run out of room to grow: the area that pays more runs into the ceiling first.

Overtime is capped, and the cap is local

For employees exempt from the Fair Labor Standards Act, time and a half is paid only while the hourly rate is at or below that of GS-10 step 1 in their own area. Above it, the overtime hour is capped at one and a half times the GS-10 step 1 rate.

Under 5 U.S.C. 5542 and 5 CFR 550.113 an overtime hour is paid at one and a half times your hourly rate while that rate stays at or below the hourly rate of GS-10 step 1 in your locality. Above it, the hour is paid at the greater of your own hourly rate and one and a half times the GS-10 step 1 hourly rate — not both. In 2026 GS-10 step 1 is $58,064 a year before locality pay.

That cap is the whole rule only for employees the Fair Labor Standards Act does not cover. An employee it covers — non-exempt, in the Act’s terms — earns overtime under both rules and is paid under whichever gives more in the week (5 CFR 551.513); FLSA overtime is one and a half times the employee’s own regular rate, with no GS-10 cap (5 CFR 551.512). Which applies is a property of the position, recorded as its FLSA category. The overtime figures on this site are the title 5 ones, the same OPM prints in its hourly tables.

The threshold is a local number, so its dollar value differs between areas. The point where the premium disappears does not: locality pay scales the GS-10 step 1 rate and the employee’s own rate by the same percentage, so in every one of the 58 areas an exempt employee at GS-12 step 6, or in any cell that pays more, is paid exactly the ordinary hourly rate for an overtime hour.

What this site does not cover

Roughly a third of federal employees are not on the General Schedule. Wage Grade trades, Senior Executive Service, and agency-specific systems such as FAA’s FV bands, TSA, VA Title 38 medical positions, and various demonstration projects all use different tables. Special rate schedules can also override the General Schedule for particular occupations and locations — where one applies, the employee receives the higher of the special rate and the locality rate, never the two added together.

What happens every January

The pay adjustment for the coming year is normally set in late December by executive order, after which OPM publishes the new tables — one nationwide base table and one for each locality pay area. The adjustment has two parts that are frequently confused: an across-the-board increase applied to the base schedule, and a separate locality component that differs by area. A headline figure of, say, two percent is the across-the-board part plus the average of the locality part, and almost nobody receives exactly that average.

The President may also submit an alternative pay plan, which sets the adjustment aside and substitutes a different figure — including zero. This has happened repeatedly, and it is the mechanism by which locality percentages have been frozen while the base schedule still moved. When that happens the locality percentages carry over unchanged from the previous year, so an area’s relative position stays put even as the dollar figures rise.

New locality pay areas are added occasionally, and the effect on the people in them is large: a duty station moving out of Rest of U.S. into a named area gains the difference between the two percentages overnight, with no promotion and no step increase involved. The Federal Salary Council reviews candidate areas and recommends additions, but the process takes years and the recommendation is not binding.

The primary sources

Every rule on this page comes from one of these, and every pay rate, price level and county list on this site from the first five.

Where this page has had a rule or a citation wrong, the correction is listed with its date on the corrections page.