Locality Pay Area Finder
Locality pay follows your duty station county, and the areas reach much further than the cities they are named for. Pick your state and county to get the 2026 area, the percentage, and what the same grade earns there versus Rest of U.S.
Reviewed by Jonathan D., 20-year federal employee · County list built from OPM.gov ·
Use the state your duty station sits in, not where you live. Locality pay follows the official worksite.
67 places in Virginia are named in the 2026 definitions. Search by county, parish, or independent city as OPM lists them, not by city, town, or base name: a city is in its county's area unless OPM lists it as an independent city.
Only counties OPM names in a locality pay area appear here. If yours is missing, pick the last option and you are Rest of U.S.
Fairfax County, VA is in the Washington-Baltimore-Arlington, DC-MD-VA-WV-PA locality pay area, worth 33.94 percent on top of base pay in 2026.
| Modeled | Not modeled |
|---|---|
| Every county, parish, independent city, and named duty station OPM lists in the 2026 locality pay area definitions: 925 places across 57 separate areas (920 counties, parishes and independent cities, the states of Alaska and Hawaii, and three named duty stations, one per coded row on OPM’s page), plus the Rest of U.S. fallback. | City search. The lookup is state plus county, because county is the unit OPM actually defines, and the filter matches OPM’s county names only. Independent cities appear where OPM names them, such as Alexandria city, VA. A filter that matches nothing returns no answer, and a filter that lands on a same-name county or a single place asks you to confirm the county. |
| The Rest of U.S. answer for any county OPM does not name, a direct answer for the eight states with no named county, and the territories and possessions in 5 CFR 591.205 (Puerto Rico, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and the minor outlying islands), all Rest of U.S. under 5 CFR 531.603(b)(58). A state or place the finder does not recognize is refused rather than defaulted to Rest of U.S. | A full list of all 3,000-plus U.S. counties. We list only what OPM names and treat everything else as Rest of U.S., which is what 5 CFR 531.603 provides. |
| 2026 locality percentages read from the same GS pay table the FedTools GS Pay Calculator uses, so the two cannot drift apart. | Prior-year or projected 2027 percentages, and any mid-year redefinition. OPM says the 2026 geographic definitions match 2025. |
| GS-7 step 1 and GS-12 step 1 annual pay in the matched area, with the dollar gap against Rest of U.S. | Your own grade and step. Use the GS Pay Calculator for that, and the pay-table link in the result jumps straight to the area page. |
| General Schedule locality pay under 5 U.S.C. 5304. In Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands the result notes that the duty station is also a cost-of-living allowance area under 5 CFR 591.207. | The amount of any nonforeign cost-of-living allowance still payable under 5 U.S.C. 5941 and 5 CFR 591 subpart B, and post differentials. Special rate tables under 5 U.S.C. 5305, Federal Wage System wage areas, law enforcement special base rates, SES and Senior Level pay (which carries no locality payment), and the three named Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst duty stations beyond their area assignment. |
| A duty-station lookup for pay purposes. | GSA per diem localities and OPM locality pay areas are different geographies with different boundaries. Do not use one to answer the other. |
Annual figures are rounded to the dollar the way OPM publishes them. Your SF-50 and your servicing HR office are the record of your official duty station.
What we counted
Nobody publishes the shape of the locality pay map as numbers, so we counted it. OPM's 2026 definitions name 925 places across 57 separate locality pay areas, plus the Rest of U.S. catch-all. The list is almost entirely counties, with independent cities where a state has them and three named duty stations at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst.
How we count: one place is one row OPM prints with a code. That is 920 counties, parishes and independent cities with five-digit FIPS codes, the whole states of Alaska and Hawaii (two-digit state codes), and the three Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst duty stations (nine-digit state-city-county codes). The Rest of U.S. row has no code and is not counted. A count that keeps only five-digit codes gets 920, and one that skips only the three nine-digit duty-station codes gets 922. We recounted every row on OPM's page on October 4, 2026, and the 925 codes match this tool's list one for one.
The areas are wildly uneven. Atlanta reaches 64 counties across two states. Washington- Baltimore-Arlington covers 55 places across four states and DC. At the other end, San Diego is a single county, and Palm Bay-Melbourne-Titusville is one county in Florida.
| Locality pay area | Places | 2026 rate |
|---|---|---|
| Atlanta--Athens-Clarke County--Sandy Springs, GA-AL | 64 | 23.79% |
| Washington-Baltimore-Arlington, DC-MD-VA-WV-PA | 55 | 33.94% |
| New York-Newark, NY-NJ-CT-PA | 40 | 37.95% |
| Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN-WI | 36 | 27.62% |
| Indianapolis-Carmel-Muncie, IN | 34 | 18.15% |
| Kansas City-Overland Park-Kansas City, MO-KS | 33 | 18.97% |
Eight states are entirely Rest of U.S.
For 2026, OPM names no county at all in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, or Wyoming. Every federal duty station in those eight states is paid at the Rest of U.S. rate of 17.06 percent. If you work in one of them, the finder says so outright rather than making you scroll a list.
Rest of U.S. is not a leftover category. OPM defines it as the portions of the United States and its territories and possessions, excluding foreign areas, not located within another locality pay area, and it has its own pay table. Puerto Rico, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and the other nonforeign areas outside Alaska and Hawaii sit inside it, because 5 CFR 531.603(b)(58) ties Rest of U.S. to the list in 5 CFR 591.205. All of them are in the finder's state list. Puerto Rico, Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands, and the Virgin Islands are also cost-of-living allowance areas under 5 CFR 591.207, as are Alaska and Hawaii. That allowance was cut by statutory formula when locality pay was phased in, and the finder does not compute it.
Why the county line is worth thousands
At GS-12 step 1 the 2026 base rate is $76,463. In Rest of U.S. that becomes $89,508. In the Washington-Baltimore-Arlington area it is $102,415, a difference of $12,907 for identical work. In San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland, the highest area in the country at 46.34 percent, it is $111,896, or $22,388 above Rest of U.S.
That gap is why a duty-station change, a telework agreement that moves your official worksite, or a reassignment across one county line can move your salary by more than a promotion would. It also feeds into your high-3 average and your FERS annuity, because locality pay is basic pay for retirement purposes. And it sets the GS-10 step 1 figure that caps your title 5 overtime rate.
One warning worth repeating: GSA per diem localities and OPM locality pay areas are different geographies. A city can be its own per diem locality while its county sits inside a much larger pay area. Do not use the per diem lookup to answer a locality pay question.