The 2026 federal pay raise is 1.0 percent for General Schedule employees, with locality pay percentages frozen at their 2025 levels. Executive Order 14368, signed December 18, 2025, set the new rates, which took effect the first full pay period beginning on or after January 1, 2026 — January 11 for most employees.1National Finance Center. Supersede Annual Pay Raise 2026
What You Actually Get in 2026
The raise is a flat 1.0 percent added to base General Schedule pay. Locality pay, the geographic percentage layered on top of base pay, did not go up at all. So the total increase works out to roughly 1.0 percent no matter where you work.
Locality percentages themselves still range from 17.06 percent in the lowest-paying area to 46.34 percent in San Francisco, spread across 58 locality pay areas. Those numbers simply carried over from 2025 unchanged.2Federal Register. January 2026 Pay Schedules
In practical terms, a GS-12, Step 5 employee in the Washington-Baltimore-Arlington area picks up roughly $900 more per year in gross pay. In areas with smaller locality adjustments, the dollar figure is proportionally smaller. To see your exact new salary, apply 1.0 percent to your 2025 base pay, then apply your existing locality percentage.
Why the Raise Is So Small
Under the default statutory formula, the 2026 raise would have been much larger. The base General Schedule adjustment alone would have been 3.3 percent, and the average locality increase on top would have been 18.88 percent. The administration estimated that implementing the full locality adjustments would have cost $24 billion in the first year.3U.S. Government Publishing Office. House Document 119-87 – Pay Adjustments for Civilian Federal Employees
That did not happen because the President invoked the alternative pay plan authority in 5 U.S.C. § 5303(b). That provision lets the President substitute a different raise if a national emergency or serious economic conditions make the automatic raise inappropriate. The alternative plan for 2026, transmitted to Congress on August 29, 2025, set the base increase at 1.0 percent and the locality increase at zero.4Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 5 USC 5303 – Annual Adjustments to Pay Schedules
Congress can override an alternative plan by passing legislation specifying a different raise. It did not do so for 2026, so the President’s numbers stand. This is the same pattern that has held for every raise since the early 1990s: no president has ever allowed the full formula-driven increase to take effect.
Pay Caps That May Cut Your Raise Short
If you’re a higher-graded employee in an expensive area, the 1.0 percent may not fully reach your paycheck. Total General Schedule pay, meaning base plus locality, is capped at the rate for Level IV of the Executive Schedule, which is $197,200 for 2026. Any GS employee whose base plus locality would exceed that ceiling gets capped there. This mainly hits senior GS-14 and GS-15 employees in the highest-cost locality areas.5U.S. Office of Personnel Management. January 2026 Pay Adjustments
A separate aggregate limit covers total compensation, including base, locality, overtime, bonuses, and premium payments. That limit is $253,100 for 2026, equal to Executive Schedule Level I. Senior Executive Service members and employees in senior-level or scientific positions covered by a certified performance appraisal system have a higher aggregate cap of $292,300.5U.S. Office of Personnel Management. January 2026 Pay Adjustments
The Military Got 3.8 Percent. Civilians Got 1.0.
Uniformed military personnel received a 3.8 percent raise for 2026 under the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2026, signed the same day as the civilian executive order. That is a 2.8-point spread between military and civilian raises. Congress has historically aimed for parity between the two, matching the percentages in most years since the mid-1980s.
One narrow group of civilians was pulled up. The alternative pay plan directed OPM to use existing authorities to give certain federal law enforcement personnel additional compensation so their total increase would match the 3.8 percent military figure.3U.S. Government Publishing Office. House Document 119-87 – Pay Adjustments for Civilian Federal Employees For every other civilian employee, the 1.0 percent is the raise.
How This Compares to Recent Years
The 1.0 percent figure is the smallest raise federal employees have seen in several years. For 2025, the raise was 2.0 percent base plus an average 0.5 percent locality, totaling roughly 2.7 percent. Employees received three consecutive years of raises at or above 4 percent from 2023 through 2025.6Congressional Research Service. Federal Pay – General Schedule Pay Adjustment Process, Amounts Provided Since 2010, and Issues for Congress The 2026 raise is a sharp reversal from that stretch.
Could Congress Still Change the 2026 Number?
In theory, yes. A spending bill that specifies a different pay raise percentage supersedes the President’s alternative plan. In practice, this rarely happens, and it did not happen for 2026. The executive order controls.
Continuing resolutions and government shutdowns raise separate questions. A pay raise set by executive order can generally still take effect during a continuing resolution, because the raise authority flows from the executive order rather than the appropriations bill. A CR that explicitly freezes pay or sets a different figure would override that. During a lapse in appropriations, furloughed employees stop receiving paychecks entirely, but the Government Employee Fair Treatment Act of 2019 guarantees retroactive pay for furloughed federal workers once funding is restored.
The Locality Areas That Did Not Get Added
The Federal Salary Council recommended creating two new locality pay areas for 2026: Kennewick-Richland-Walla Walla, Washington, and Syracuse-Auburn, New York. It also recommended designating 11 areas as new research areas for future locality consideration.7U.S. Office of Personnel Management. Federal Salary Council Recommendations Because the alternative plan froze locality percentages, none of these recommendations produced higher pay for employees in those areas this year. If you work in one of the proposed new areas, your 2026 pay reflects whatever locality area you were previously assigned to, at the 2025 percentage.