New localities in the Fresno, Calif.; Reno, Nev.; Rochester, N.Y.; and Spokane, Wash., areas were tentatively approved, but not finalized for 2023. Image: SevenMaps/Shutterstock.com
The President’s Pay Agent has accepted in principle recommendations to add four new localities to the GS pay program and to expand the boundaries of many existing localities but meanwhile said those changes could occur no sooner than for the January 2024, not 2023, federal raise – which will range from 4.37 to 5.15 percent.
The Pay Agent—the heads of Labor, OMB and OPM—said it “tentatively approved” recommendations from the Federal Salary Council—a group of union officials and administration appointees—to create new localities in the Fresno, Calif.; Reno, Nev.; Rochester, N.Y.; and Spokane, Wash., areas. That change, based on salary studies showing that the pay gap in those areas with the private sector met standards the Salary Council uses, would move some 16,200 employees from the rest of the U.S. locality, the lowest-paid, into new areas with their own higher rates.
The Pay Agent also tentatively agreed to the Salary Council’s recommendations to 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 that are used when drawing boundary lines. Those changes would result in the same kind of pay increase for some 15,400 employees who would be affected by the former and some 1,300 who would be affected by the latter.
However, those changes can be made only through formal rule-making and cannot be carried out until that process is complete, the Pay Agent’s report said. That process typically takes a number of months.
The needed changes recently were finalized, though, to add Carroll County, Ill., to the Davenport-Moline, locality area and Brooks County, Texas, to the Corpus Christi area. Each of those changes, to take effect in January, will affect about GS 400 employees effective with the pay period starting January 15.
The January 2023 federal employee pay raise will be decided within days, almost certainly through Congress allowing President Biden’s recommended average 4.6 percent increase to take effect by default. That would consist of a 4.1 percent across the board increase, with funds equivalent to another 0.5 percent raise divided up as locality pay.
That would result in raises ranging from several tenths of a percentage point above 4.6 in the localities with the largest reported gaps to several tenths below 4.6 in the “rest of the U.S.” locality and several others where the reported gaps are below the average. Employees working in city areas including Seattle, San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose, Los Angeles and New York stand to receive the largest raises.
An executive order would finalize the raise and allocate the locality components. The raises would take effect with the first full pay period of the new year, which in a rare coincidence in 2023 also will start with the calendar year.
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See also,
The Process of Retiring: Last-Minute Changes
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