Locality Pay Program Remains Stable

A special advisory group on federal pay matters, the Federal Salary Council, has backed only minor changes in the locality pay program for general schedule employees while recommending that the number of localities and their boundary zones remain unchanged. The group rejected requests from numerous areas in the catchall "rest of the U.S." locality area to be attached to a metropolitan area where pay is higher, although it plans to review the standards it uses for adding areas. The council also agreed to some changes in how the pay gaps with the private sector are calculated, most notably deciding to use data from all employers, not just those with 50 or more employees. According to a council document, there has been a general expectation that counting smaller employers would show smaller pay gaps on the theory that they pay less than large employers, but the data showed the opposite, and thus the indicated pay gaps are slightly higher than they would have been under the old methodology. The average gap in the latest calculation–25.17 percent–also was increased slightly due to what the document called outlying data produced by large incentive payments paid by some of the private sector companies studied.