WG Pay Scale Lookup
Federal Wage System pay is set by a local wage survey, not a national table. Pick your wage area, schedule type, grade, and step to get the hourly rate off the official DoD schedule, the annual equivalent, and how long each remaining step takes.
Reviewed by Jonathan D., 20-year federal employee · Formulas verified against DCPAS wage schedules ·
This lookup carries 26 schedules across 12 wage areas. There are 132 appropriated-fund regular wage areas in total. Type a city, state code or three-digit area code to find out whether yours is in the dropdown above, real but not loaded here, or not a wage area at all.
| What this models | Not modeled |
|---|---|
| Hourly WG and WL rates for grades 1 to 15 and WS rates for grades 1 to 19 (5 CFR 532.203(a), (b)), steps 1 to 5 | Special production facilitating (WD, WN) and other special wage schedules printed on the same PDF |
| Annual estimate as hourly times 2,087 hours, an illustrative full-year convention (no FWS rule sets an annual figure; 5 U.S.C. 5504(b) does not apply to prevailing rate employees) | Overtime, night differential, environmental differential, Sunday premium, hazard pay |
| Biweekly as hourly times 80 hours, two 40-hour basic workweeks (5 U.S.C. 6101(a)(2)(A)) | Part-time or intermittent schedules, which pay only the hours worked |
| Step waiting periods from 5 U.S.C. 5343(e)(2) and 5 CFR 532.417 | Your own creditable service, breaks in service, or time in nonpay status, which move your step date |
| 26 regular ("R") schedules across 12 wage areas | The other 120 regular wage areas; the tool names yours and links DCPAS |
| The footnote printed on each source schedule, shown verbatim. On the 16 schedules whose footnote points to a CPM 2022-02 special rate schedule, the result names and links that special schedule and, where it prints your series and grade, shows its cell as the payable rate (all 1,875 special cells on the 16 special schedules are loaded, read off the PDFs) with the regular rate beside it | Special schedules DCPAS issues after the dates shown: M030 (March 17, 2026) predates the September 2026 AC-030R reissue, so confirm the current version with your HR office |
| Appropriated-fund (AF) schedules | Non-appropriated-fund (NAF) schedules, floating-plant ("F") and lock-and-dam ("L") schedules |
| Precision: rates to the cent as printed; annual rounded to the dollar | Retroactive pay, pay retention, grade retention, or any locality-pay-style percentage on top |
Why there is no national WG table
The General Schedule starts from one national base table and adds a locality percentage. The Federal Wage System does the opposite. DoD surveys private-sector wages in each of the 132 appropriated-fund wage areas DCPAS lists and pays the local prevailing rate directly. On a WG grade, step 2 is set at 100 percent of that surveyed rate, with steps 1, 3, 4 and 5 at 96, 104, 108 and 112 percent of it, under 5 U.S.C. 5343(e)(1) — a provision scoped to “a regular wage schedule for nonsupervisor prevailing rate employees”. The WL and WS schedules carry the same five percentages, but of their own step 2 payline rate rather than a prevailing rate, under 5 CFR 532.203(f).
One thing that structure does not give you is a way to compute a rate. Applying a step percentage to the printed step 2 cell does not reproduce the printed rate: across grades 1 to 15 on the 26 schedules loaded here it misses on 3,653 of the 4,680 non-step-2 cells, 78 percent, by up to 19 cents an hour. The Washington-Baltimore schedule prints $45.27 for WG-13 step 4 where 108 percent of its $41.74 step 2 comes to $45.08, a gap worth about $397 a year at 2,087 hours. Rounding the step 2 cell moves a derived step by half a cent at most. The gap comes from the pay cap: the annual appropriations act limits each raise rate by rate, and OPM's FY 2026 memo (CPM 2025-20) says that under section 737(a), “If any rate exceeds the rate payable on September 30, 2025, by more than 1.00 percent (after rounding), that rate must be reduced to the highest rate that does not exceed 1.00 percent.” Each cell is capped against its own prior-year rate, and minimum-wage adjustments sit outside the cap, so year after year the printed steps drift off the percentages. This tool reads the published cell and shows the percentage arithmetic beside it as a reconciliation, never as the source of the number.
Two consequences catch people out. Raises land on each area's own survey cycle, so the schedules in this lookup carry effective dates spread through the year rather than all arriving in January. And a wage area can reach counties in more than one GS locality pay area, which is why some areas here have two or three live schedules with different numbers. Your official duty station decides which one pays you. The Federal Wage System pay scale guide walks through the survey mechanics and the WG-10 versus GS-7 comparison.
Six years from step 1 to step 5
With a rating of satisfactory or better, step increases are automatic. The waiting period is counted in calendar weeks of service in the step you hold: 26 weeks in step 1, 78 weeks in step 2, and 104 weeks in each of steps 3 and 4. Counted from your first day at step 1 that puts step 2 at 26 weeks, step 3 at 104 weeks, step 4 at 208 weeks, and step 5 at 312 weeks, about six years. The authority is 5 U.S.C. 5343(e)(2), carried into regulation at 5 CFR 532.417.
Time in a nonpay status eats into a waiting period past a short allowance: one workweek for step 2, three workweeks for step 3, and four workweeks for steps 4 and 5, under 5 CFR 532.417(c)(2). This lookup shows the statutory schedule, not your own service record, so treat the dates as the earliest case.
Where these rates come from
Every hourly figure was read out of the DoD/DCPAS schedule PDF that the result links. Nothing is interpolated. Each of the 26 schedules was checked after extraction: 15 grades present, five strictly increasing steps in each of WG, WL, and WS, WL above WG and WS above WL at step 1, and WG step 1 rising across every grade. All 26 passed. The WS-16 through WS-19 rows were read cell for cell off the same PDFs.
Where a schedule prints a footnote, you get it word for word. Sixteen of the 26 carry the CPM 2022-02 note telling you to read the matching special rate schedule for the payable rate. Those special schedules reach different distances up the grades: San Antonio's and Virginia Beach's cover every WG and WL grade, Huntsville's and Pensacola's stop at grade 2 or 3, Hawaii's cover grade 1. Where the special schedule prints your grade, the headline shows the special schedule's rate as what you are paid, puts the regular rate beside it, and links the special schedule. Four show asterisked rates adjusted to meet a minimum wage: Jacksonville AC-030R and Pensacola AC-034R for the state of Florida, Washington-Baltimore AC-227R for the District of Columbia, and San Diego AC-217R for “localities within the wage area”. Two more, the Seattle-Everett pair AC-143R and AC-343R, carry an asterisk for rates adjusted to relieve pay compression. One, Philadelphia AC-115R, notes that the appropriations lapse kept the FY26 survey from meeting 5 CFR 532. Those notes change what you are actually paid, so hiding them would make the number wrong.