Welcome to GS Pay Compare, a 100% free, open-access utility for visualizing General Schedule (GS) salary differences across the United States. Federal employees and private citizens alike can use this tool with no account required to accurately gauge exact locality adjustments year-over-year.
Whether you are considering a new federally-aligned job offer, negotiating a transfer to a new GS grade and step, or simply researching historical government wages, this web application provides instantaneous, mobile-friendly salary comparisons to help you make informed financial decisions.
Navigating federal pay scales can be an incredibly cumbersome experience. While official resources provide the raw data, they are often difficult to use, heavily fragmented, and not optimized for quick, side-by-side comparisons on modern devices.
Understanding how the GS pay scale changes from different areas of the country usually involves downloading multiple spreadsheets or clicking through complicated PDF tables. Comparing a potential move from one locality to another required tedious cross-referencing to visualize the real financial impact of a transfer or promotion.
Our tool pulls this official data directly from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) into an interactive salary chart to provide an uncompromised visualization of exactly what an agency transfer, a grade step-up, or a cross-country relocation means for your bottom line.
We built GS Pay Compare to eliminate that friction. By aggregating this official locality data into a clean, interactive calculator, we aim to provide a streamlined, user-friendly interface that lets you instantly see how your compensation changes based on location, grade, and step—empowering you to focus on your career decisions rather than doing manual math.
I have been an active federal employee since 2013, with over a decade of civil service experience navigating competitive promotions, lateral agency transfers, and geographic relocations. Climbing the General Schedule ladder often requires making strategic decisions about when and where to take a new position. However, before packing up and moving across the country, ensuring that a change in locality pay actually results in a true net increase in purchasing power rather than a hidden cost-of-living reduction is critical.
I built GS Pay Compare to give the federal community the tool I always wished existed: a clean, immediate way to compare compensation side-by-side across every duty station in the country, grounded directly in official Title 5 federal regulations (5 CFR Part 531) and official OPM annual tables.
Every calculator and guide on this site is reviewed against primary federal statutes to ensure complete compliance, precision, and practical utility for career civil servants and federal job seekers.
GS Pay Compare is an independent utility and is not affiliated with, maintained by, or endorsed by the U.S. Government or the Office of Personnel Management (OPM).
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