Action on Raise Could Revive Prospects for More Localities

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By: FEDweek Staff

By increasing the prospects for a general federal employee pay riase in January, a Senate committee may have also increased the prospects of creating new GS localities, which in turn would benefit employees living in the affected area.

The Senate Appropriations Committee in recommending a 1.9 percent raise also specified that 1.4 percentage points would be paid across the board and the funds for the other 0.5 percentage points would be divided among the GS localities. That likely would result in raises ranging from about 1.7 to about 2.2 percent.

For several years, the Federal Salary Council has recommended adding localities to the GS system in the Burlington, Vt., Norfolk, Va., Birmingham, Ala., and San Antonio areas. A higher-level body, the President’s Pay Agent, has been receptive although it has not issued the needed rules. When a new locality is created—or when boundaries of an existing one are expanded—affected employees receive a boost in pay; they move from the lowest-paid locality—the “rest of the U.S.” area outside of the metropolitan areas—to an area with its own rate, which is higher by definition.

Earlier this year at a meeting of the salary council, officials indicated a readiness to move ahead on longstanding recommendations to create separate localities for those four areas and also possibly for Corpus Christi, Texas, and Omaha as well, along with expanding several current locality zones. There was no estimate of how many employees might benefit, although the number likely would be in the tens of thousands.

However, questions arose at the time regarding whether it made sense to go through the process to create those localities for 2019 if no raise was to be paid and the localities would therefore exist only on paper, with no benefit to the employees. Having a raise in the pipeline could provide an impetus to issue the rules needed to have those changes in place on time.

The Senate spending measure, like the House counterpart, would continue the practice of granting wage grade employees in an area the same-size raise as GS employees, even though the two are under separate locality-based systems.