The move would bring the total number of localities to 58, and could help with recruitment and retention in certain areas. Image: Foxys Graphic/Shutterstock.com
OPM has proposed rules to create four new GS localities and to widen the boundaries of a number of existing ones, actions that would result in higher pay for some 33,000 employees working in the affected areas.
It would do that by removing them from the lowest-paid locality, the catchall “rest of the U.S.” for areas outside city zones with their own pay rates, into an area with its own designated rate.
“These changes would result in geographic differences in federal salaries better reflecting the overall geographic differences in salary in line with statutory goals. In turn, this could affect federal recruitment and retention across the U.S.,” says a June 28 Federal Register notice.
The notice follows recommendations made last year by the Federal Salary Council, consisting of federal unions and federal pay experts. That council recently issued a report repeating those recommendations and urging action in time for the changes to be effective in January 2024. The President’s Pay Agent—the heads of Labor, OMB and OPM—had tentatively approved the recommendations late last year, but a notice-and-comment rulemaking process is needed to put them effect.
The rules would establish new localities in the Fresno, Calif.; Reno, Nev.; Rochester, N.Y.; and Spokane, Wash., areas. That change, based on studies showing that the pay gap in those areas with the private sector met standards the Salary Council uses, would move some 16,700 employees into new areas with their own higher rates, according to the notice.
That would bring the total number of localities to 58 (55 city areas, the catchall rest of the U.S. locality, and the treatment of both Alaska and Hawaii as localities in their entirety).
The notice also would loosen the rules on attaching outlying areas—called “areas of application”—to a locality and to adopt the most current OMB definitions of city areas for use when drawing boundary lines. Those changes would result in the same kind of pay increase for some 16,200 employees in dozens of counties adjoining current pay localities; the notice includes a list.
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