2027 GS pay scale and federal pay raise: 0% proposed — a pay freeze

Three scenarios for 2027, worked out

Three sets of numbers for 2027 have a primary source behind them. Only one of them fixes the rate of every locality pay area, and that is the one the President proposed.

The freeze: the 2027 tables as proposed

A freeze sets base pay and every locality percentage to their 2026 values, so every one of the 8,700 rates in the 58 locality tables stays where it is. This is the 2027 GS base table the President’s plan asks for; your own rate is the base plus your area percentage, which the calculator works out.

Base pay up 3.1%: the FAIR Act and the statutory formula

Both would raise the base table 3.1 percent. The table below applies that to the 2026 base by the rule that reproduces OPM’s own base tables for 2020 to 2026 to the dollar: step 1 of each grade is raised by the percentage and rounded to the dollar, and from GS-3 up each further step adds one thirtieth of step 1, rounded the same way. GS-1 and GS-2 have uneven steps; their steps 2 to 10 here are the 2026 rates raised by the percentage, which in each of the last seven years came within $6 of OPM’s figures.

Locality pay moves too (the FAIR Act: locality pay an increase of 1%, divided among the areas by the order; the statutory formula: locality pay up an average of 20.6%), and a locality increase is divided among the areas by the President’s order: no source gives the figure for each of the 58 areas, so this page does not print locality tables for either. The latest area-by-area estimate of what the formula would pay, for 2026, is on each locality page under “What the 1990 pay law’s formula would pay”.

The formula is not a guess. Base pay rises by the increase in the Employment Cost Index for private industry wages and salaries over the twelve months to September, less half a percentage point (5 U.S.C. 5303(a)): for January 2027 that is 3.6 percent, from September 2024 to September 2025, less half a point, or 3.1 percent. It is not always set aside — for 2020 the President’s own letter let base pay rise by the formula’s 2.6 percent, “as prescribed under 5 U.S.C. 5303a” — but the letter can set it aside, which is why the letter matters more than the arithmetic.

Locality is a different matter. The law asks it to close the gap between federal and non-federal pay in each labor market to a residual 5 percent, and the Pay Agent’s own report says the statutory formula for locality adjustments “has not been followed since January 1994”. On the last published measurement the gap was 56.57 percent. For 2027 the letter itself gives the cost of following it: locality pay would rise by an average of 20.6 percent, costing $26 billion in the first year alone, on top of the 3.1 percent to base pay, which is why the formula keeps being set aside.

In every scenario a locality rate is worked out the same way: the base rate plus the area percentage, rounded to the dollar, then held to the statutory ceiling — Executive Schedule level IV, $197,200 in 2026. The 2027 ceiling is set with the same executive order; the tables on this page that show 2027 locality rates assume it stays at $197,200, which is what a freeze implies but not yet what any order says.

What a 2027 freeze would mean for real pay, area by area

A 0% raise leaves a salary where it is while prices keep moving. Across U.S. cities consumer prices rose 3.4% in the twelve months to August 2026. If pay is frozen for 2027, at that rate a salary buys 3.3% less a year on: a 0% raise with 3.4% inflation is a 3.3% cut in real pay.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes the same index for 23 metropolitan areas, and 20 of them match a locality pay area. Among those, prices rose fastest in Hawaii (5.6% to July 2026) and slowest in Houston, TX (1.3% to August 2026). The other 38 areas, Rest of U.S. among them, have no index of their own and take the U.S. city average. The last column puts the cut in dollars for GS-12 step 5: what a year of that inflation would take from the 2026 salary, frozen.

What these numbers are and are not. The consumer price index (CPI-U, all items, not seasonally adjusted) measures how prices in a place changed over time; it says nothing about whether the place is cheap or dear. The price levels used elsewhere on this site are the Bureau of Economic Analysis’s Regional Price Parities, a different measure, and the two should not be mixed. A BLS metropolitan area is not a locality pay area: OPM’s areas are usually larger, and the match here is by the principal city in OPM’s name for the area, where one of BLS’s areas is named after it (for Washington-Baltimore-Arlington, Washington’s index). Most metro indexes are published every other month, so the latest month differs by area. And the last twelve months are not a forecast of 2027: if prices rise more slowly, a freeze costs less.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index, series CUUR0000SA0 and the metro series linked in the table, retrieved 6 October 2026.

What the last 7 years did

The 2026 rates on this site are the ones in force: Executive Order 14368, signed 18 December 2025, raised base rates 1.0 percent and held locality percentages at their 2025 levels, from the first pay period of January 2026. In each of the last seven years the order was signed between 18 and 31 December.

Base and locality are announced separately in the President’s letter and fixed together in the executive order. The overall figure is the government-wide average, not anybody’s actual raise: what you get depends on your locality area.

The letter is not the last word

A President can announce one thing in August and be overruled before January. For 2020 the letter of 30 August 2019 let the formula’s 2.6 percent base increase stand and kept locality pay at 2019 levels; Congress then wrote 2.6 percent for base pay and an average 0.5 percent for locality pay into an appropriations act signed on 20 December 2019 (Public Law 116-93, section 748), and Executive Order 13901 followed on 26 December. For 2019 a freeze was announced; Congress put a 1.9 percent raise into an appropriations act instead, and Executive Order 13866 was signed on 28 March 2019 — three months into the year, backdated. Those precedents are why the subject stays open until the order is signed.

That path is open for 2027, and it has already been asked for. On 15 September 2026 members of Congress wrote to the Senate and House leadership of both parties asking them to reject the freeze. The letter asks for a raise of no less than 3.8 percent — the same figure the President’s letter directs for law enforcement personnel — and preferably 4.1 percent under the FAIR Act, written into Fiscal Year 2027 appropriations. A request is not a law: it becomes one only if the language survives into an enacted appropriations act, and the executive order in December is still what sets the tables. Read the letter.