- All localities
- Methodology
2026 editionEffective January 202658 locality pay areasData last changed 2026-08-25
How these numbers are made
Every figure on this site can be traced to a published federal source and reproduced from it. This page says exactly how, and what stops publication when something does not add up.
Who publishes this
GS Pay Tables is published by BiLingoPlus LLC, a limited liability company registered in the State of Wyoming.
It is a small independent publisher. It is not a newsroom, not a consultancy, not a government body and not connected to one. Nobody pays to appear here and there is no sponsored content of any kind. When advertising is added it will be visually separated and labelled, and it will have no influence on any figure or any wording on this site.
The reason to trust a number here is not who wrote it. It is that you can check it: the source is named, the arithmetic is described, and the result is reproducible. Where you find that we are wrong, tell us — corrections are made on the page and move the date in the footer.
Where every number comes from
Four public datasets, all works of the United States government and all in the public domain.
Salary tables and locality percentages. U.S. Office of Personnel Management, 2026 General Schedule salary tables, taken from the machine-readable files OPM publishes rather than retyped from a PDF. The list of locality codes is read from OPM’s own index page each time, never hardcoded: the number of areas has changed from 48 to 54 to 58, and a fixed list would silently miss a new one.
Locality pay area definitions. OPM, 2026. These are the counties and military installations that make up each area — 920 counties across 57 areas, with Rest of U.S. defined by exclusion.
Price levels. U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis Regional Price Parities for 2024, at metropolitan level for the 55 metropolitan areas and at state level for Alaska and Hawaii, where the locality area is the whole state and the state index is therefore an exact match rather than a proxy.
ZIP code relationships. U.S. Census Bureau 2020 ZCTA to county relationship file, used only to answer "which area is this ZIP in".
The arithmetic, in the order the law sets it
Locality rate = base rate, multiplied by one plus the locality percentage, rounded to the nearest dollar, and only then checked against the statutory ceiling.
That order matters. No General Schedule rate may exceed Level IV of the Executive Schedule, $197,200 in 2026. Applying the ceiling before rounding rather than after gives different figures at the top of the schedule, which is one reason published numbers occasionally disagree between reference sites. In 2026 the ceiling binds 97 cells across 37 areas.
Two derived figures follow the same discipline. The hourly rate is the annual rate divided by 2,087 hours, rounded to the cent. The biweekly rate is the hourly rate multiplied by 80 — not the annual rate divided by 26, which gives a different and wrong answer. The overtime rate follows 5 U.S.C. 5542: one and a half times your hourly rate while that rate stays at or below the GS-10 step 1 rate for your area, and above it the greater of your own rate and one and a half times GS-10 step 1.
Each of those three rules was derived from the published data itself and then checked against all 8,700 published cells. Not one disagrees.
What the purchasing-power figure is, and is not
It is the salary divided by the local price level. Nothing more elaborate than that, and nothing hidden.
Locality pay is calculated from what private employers in the same region pay for comparable work. It is not a cost-of-living adjustment, and OPM says so plainly. Dividing the salary by the BEA price index, where 100 is the national average, gives a figure that is comparable across the country: what the salary would have to be, at average U.S. prices, to buy the same things.
Three limits are stated on every page that uses it. The price index is published a year or more behind the pay tables. Metropolitan boundaries do not match locality pay area boundaries exactly, so the nearest metropolitan area is used as the proxy and named. And where two areas come out within one percent of each other, we say they are the same rather than pretending to a precision the data does not have.
Rest of U.S. is left without a figure entirely. It is a residual drawn from every state at once, no single price index describes it, and putting 100 there would be an invention.
What stops publication
The build fails, and nothing ships, when any of sixteen checks finds a problem in the finished pages.
The first is the strictest: every rate is recomputed independently from the base table and the percentage and compared with the figure OPM published. A single cell out by a dollar stops the build. On the 2026 tables all 8,700 match.
The rest examine the rendered HTML rather than the source, because the defects that matter are the ones that survive a correct-looking build: a page that contradicts itself about whether an area gains or loses ground; an area silently missing from a table; a broken internal link; text that reaches the reader as an escape sequence instead of a character; a class with no styling behind it; a request to a third-party domain. Each check exists because that exact mistake was made here at least once.
Every check is proved by deliberately breaking the source and confirming the build goes red. A check that has never failed proves nothing.
Separately, the whole site is rebuilt from an empty directory before release, so that "it builds on my machine" cannot pass for "it builds".
What this site deliberately does not do
Take-home pay, tax, and advice.
Every figure here is gross pay: what the job pays before anything is taken out. Take-home depends on your FERS tier, your Thrift Savings Plan contribution and its type, your health and life insurance elections, your filing status and the income tax of the state you live in — which is not always the state you work in. We would rather publish one number that is exactly right than a take-home estimate resting on half a dozen assumptions invented on your behalf.
Nor does this site cover the Federal Wage System, the Senior Executive Service, Title 38 medical positions, law enforcement officer rates or special rate tables. Where one of those applies to you, the figure here is a floor rather than an answer, and every page that could mislead you says so.
And nothing here is advice. GS Pay Tables publishes public federal data and arithmetic performed on it. Questions about your own pay belong to your servicing human resources office. Questions about this site belong to hello@gspaytables.com.