President Signs Order Giving Civilian Fed Workers 5.2% Raise
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden on Thursday signed an executive order fulfilling his promise to provide civilian federal workers with an average 5.2% pay raise starting in mid-January.
Biden had proposed the bump in salaries in the 2024 budget proposal he released last March.
According to data published by the Office of Personnel Management last night, the increase represents a roughly 4.7% across-the-board pay increase, which will be bolstered further by an average 0.5% increase in locality pay.
Though often thought of as a cost of living adjustment for employees living in various parts of the country, locality pay is actually based on a comparison of wages for federal versus non-federal employees in similar occupations, who live in the same geographic region.
Biden also signed the fiscal 2024 National Defense Authorization Act on Thursday, which will raise the pay for military service personnel by an average of 5.2% next year.
The average pay increases represent the largest pay hikes for federal civilian workers since the Carter administration, when the former president gave them an average increase of 9.1% during his final months in office.
A number of workers — about 33,300 of them — will also benefit next year from recent changes in the locality pay system.
Those changes include the creation of four new locality pay areas, as well as the expansion of some already existing areas.
The new areas are:
- Fresno-Madera-Hanford, California.
- Reno-Fernley, Nevada.
- Rochester-Batavia-Seneca Falls, New York.
- Spokane-Spokane Valley-Coeur d’Alene, Washington-Idaho.
The new general schedule pay tables are located here.
The affected federal workers can expect to start seeing the changes reflected in their paychecks for the first full pay period of 2024, which for most begins Jan. 14.
Last year, Federal News Network published a helpful formula that enables employees to calculate their actual pay raise.
The steps are as follows:
- First, multiply your current base salary by this year’s base pay raise percentage.
- Next, add the result from step 1 to your current base salary.
- Then multiply the result from step 2 by this year’s locality pay raise percentage for your locality pay area.
- Finally, add the result from step 3 to your answer from step 2 (rounding up).
Dan can be reached at [email protected] and at https://twitter.com/DanMcCue
