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2026 editionEffective January 202658 locality pay areasData last changed 2026-08-25
Washington GS pay scale, 2026
3 different locality pay areas cover Washington, and the same GS-12 step 5 is paid anywhere from $101,972 to $114,017 depending on nothing but which county the building sits in.
Locality pay areas
3covering federal duty stations in Washington.Spread within the state
$12,045between the best-paid and worst-paid area here, at GS-12 step 5. Same grade, same step, same state.Goes furthest here
$103,682of purchasing power in Portland-Vancouver-Salem, OR-WA — which is not the best-paid area in the state.Against Rest of U.S.
+$12,574is what the best-paid area in Washington adds over the $101,443 paid outside every named area.Which areas cover Washington, and what each pays
Rates are GS-12 step 5 in 2026. The last column is how many counties of this state each area covers.
| Locality pay area | Locality pay | On paper | Prices | What it buys | Counties here |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seattle-Tacoma, WA | 31.57% | $114,017 | 111.1 | $102,595 | 15 |
| Portland-Vancouver-Salem, OR-WA | 26.13% | $109,303 | 105.4 | $103,682 | 4 |
| Spokane-Spokane Valley-Coeur d'Alene, WA-ID | 17.67% | $101,972 | 100.3 | $101,620 | 5 |
The spread is $12,045 a year on an identical grade and step. Locality pay is set from what private employers in each region pay for comparable work, so an area with a strong private labor market pays more — and an area with expensive housing does not, unless the two happen to coincide.
Which is why the best-paid area in Washington is not the one where the salary goes furthest. Seattle-Tacoma, WA writes the biggest paycheck at $114,017; Portland-Vancouver-Salem, OR-WA pays $109,303 and leaves you $1,087 better off once local prices are counted.
Every grade at step 5 in Washington
Annual rates in U.S. dollars. Cells marked ▲ have been cut to the $197,200 statutory ceiling.
| Grade | Seattle-Tacoma | Portland-Vancouver-Salem | Spokane-Spokane Valley-Coeur d'Alene |
|---|---|---|---|
| GS-1 | 33,667 | 32,275 | 30,111 |
| GS-2 | 36,653 | 35,137 | 32,781 |
| GS-3 | 41,318 | 39,610 | 36,953 |
| GS-4 | 46,380 | 44,462 | 41,480 |
| GS-5 | 51,890 | 49,744 | 46,408 |
| GS-6 | 57,842 | 55,451 | 51,731 |
| GS-7 | 64,277 | 61,620 | 57,487 |
| GS-8 | 71,182 | 68,239 | 63,662 |
| GS-9 | 78,625 | 75,374 | 70,318 |
| GS-10 | 86,578 | 82,999 | 77,432 |
| GS-11 | 95,129 | 91,196 | 85,079 |
| GS-12 | 114,017 | 109,303 | 101,972 |
| GS-13 | 135,582 | 129,976 | 121,258 |
| GS-14 | 160,218 | 153,594 | 143,291 |
| GS-15 | 188,456 | 180,664 | 168,546 |
Each area has its own full table of 150 rates; follow the links above. To put your own grade and step against any of them, use the pay calculator, which will also find your area from a ZIP code.
Which one applies to you?
Your duty station decides it — the place you physically report to, not where you live and not where your agency is headquartered.
Locality pay areas are defined as lists of counties, and county lines rarely follow anything a person would notice. A house on one side of a line and an office on the other are paid by the office. Telework arrangements have their own rules and can change which area applies, so confirm with your servicing human resources office rather than assuming.
A few military installations are assigned by OPM to a different area than the county around them: the base gate can be a pay boundary. Each area page lists its counties in full.
What a move inside Washington is actually worth
Transfers between areas in the same state look like a raise on the offer letter. Here is how much of each one survives contact with local prices.
- Portland-Vancouver-Salem, OR-WA to Seattle-Tacoma, WA: $4,714 more on paper, $-1,087 more after prices — about -23% of what it looks like.
- Spokane-Spokane Valley-Coeur d'Alene, WA-ID to Seattle-Tacoma, WA: $12,045 more on paper, $975 more after prices — about 8% of what it looks like.
- Spokane-Spokane Valley-Coeur d'Alene, WA-ID to Portland-Vancouver-Salem, OR-WA: $7,331 more on paper, $2,062 more after prices — about 28% of what it looks like.
The percentage is the part of the headline increase that still buys something once the difference in what things cost is taken out. Where it is small, the move is a change of address rather than a change of income; where it is large, it is a genuine raise. Neither is visible on a pay table.
Two things this does not include, and both can matter more than the figures above. State and local income tax is not modelled here at all. Nor is housing tenure: a mortgage signed years ago, or a house owned outright, changes the arithmetic in a way no published price index can see.
Cities named in the Washington pay areas
OPM names each area after its principal cities. These are the ones that appear in the areas covering Washington.
- Seattle
- Tacoma
- Portland
- Vancouver
- Salem
- Spokane
- Spokane Valley
- Coeur d'Alene
The list is a label rather than a boundary. An area reaches well past the city limits of the places it is named after, and plenty of towns nobody would associate with any of them are paid at the same rate. What decides it is the county.
Some of these cities are not in Washington at all: an area named after a city in a neighboring state can still reach across the line and cover counties here. That is the point of the whole system — pay follows labor markets, and labor markets ignore state borders.
How Washington sits against the rest of the country
Of the 58 locality pay areas in the General Schedule, 9 pay more at GS-12 step 5 than the best-paid area in Washington.
The areas covering this state account for 24 named counties of the 920 that OPM lists across the whole system. Every county not on one of those lists falls into Rest of U.S., which is why a state can contain both a named area and large stretches paid at the floor rate.
Comparing states directly is less useful than it looks. Areas cross state lines: several reach into three or more states at once, and an employee moving between two of those states inside the same area sees no change in pay whatsoever. The unit of the system is the area, not the state, and the national ranking is the honest way to read it.
What a state page is good for is the question that brings people here: if a federal job in this state comes up, what is it likely to pay, and how much does the answer depend on exactly where the building is. For Washington the answer is above.
Where else these areas reach
Locality pay areas are lists of counties, and county lists ignore state borders entirely.
- Seattle-Tacoma, WA lies entirely within Washington: it covers 15 counties here and nowhere else.
- Portland-Vancouver-Salem, OR-WA covers 4 counties in Washington and also reaches into Oregon. A federal employee moving between those states inside this area sees no change in pay at all.
- Spokane-Spokane Valley-Coeur d'Alene, WA-ID covers 5 counties in Washington and also reaches into Idaho. A federal employee moving between those states inside this area sees no change in pay at all.
This is the part that surprises people transferring. A state line looks like a boundary and usually is one for tax, licensing and a dozen other things. For federal locality pay it is nothing: what matters is whether the county your duty station sits in appears on the list, and lists routinely span several states.
It also means the cost of living on either side of such a border can differ while the pay does not — which is one more reason the figure worth watching is not the salary but what the salary buys.