UPDATE 03/28/19:The President has signed an executive order that makes the 1.9 percent promised to federal employees earlier this year official. More details, here. UPDATE 03/25/19: The Trump Administration has said that the new Federal Pay Scale tables and executive order are nearing completion. No update on when pay raises are expected has been added. More details, here. UPDATE 03/05/19: New GS pay tables are reportedly undergoing review by the Office of Management and Budget. Federal employees should see the new pay scale take effect between March 22 and April 5. More details, here. ---ORIGINAL STORY--- After six weeks of uncertainty, GS employees are finally getting a little good news. On Friday, President Trump signed a new bill into action that lifted the pay scale freeze for Federal employees, granting them an average 1.9 percent pay increase. The bill allows the government to remain open through September 30 —-the end of the fiscal year— halting fears of a possible second government shutdown. But signing the new spending bill is only the first step in a series of actions that must be taken to get the OPM pay raise out to its employees. After issuing an executive order in December to freeze Federal workers' pay, the President must now issue a second executive order for the new raises to go into effect. When Will Federal GS Pay Raise Go Into Effect? How to Access New OPM Pay Scale Tables and Calculator Until the President issues a new executive order, the 1.9 percent pay raise cannot take effect. As soon as the new order is issued, the OPM will set to work updating and publishing a revised set of pay scale tables. The current pay tables, which reflect the 2019 pay freeze can be found here. Once they have been signed into action, the new GS pay rates with localities and step increases will be found on that page as well. No official date for when the changes will go into effect has been issued, but pay raises are estimated to arrive the first or third week of March. As soon as the new tables become available, we'll update this post with charts andpay scale calculator. New 2019 Locality Changes: Which Areas Will See Larger Pay Increases? While federal employees will receive an average 1.9 percent pay increase, most employees will receive a 1.4 percent raise -- the other .5 percent has been allocated for locality adjustments. Locality pay is intended to make federal pay rates competitive by aligning them to within 5% of private sector pay for a given area. In 2018, for example, GS employees in Washington, D.C. received a pay raise of 2.29%, while other Federal employees saw a 1.67% pay raise. This year, the President approved the addition of six new localities. They are as follows: Birmingham-Hoover-Talladega, AL Burlington-South Burlington, VT San Antonio-New Braunfels-Pearsall, TX Virginia Beach-Norfolk, VA-NC Corpus Christi, TX Omaha, NE Once updated, all pay scales, including pay tables with localities, will be posted on the OPM's official webpage. What About Back Pay? When Will Federal Employees Receive Retroactive Raises? According to the new spending bill, new GS localities and pay raises are effective as of the first pay period of the year: January 6, 2019. This means GS employees are retroactively owed the higher wages they should have been receiving over the last six weeks. Once the raises take effect, government agencies will be required to pay employees a lump sum for the missing pay raises. The timing of when these lump sums will be paid may be tricky, as some agencies are still processing back pay for employees who were placed on furlough or required to work without pay during the 35-day government shutdown. As more details are provided about retroactive pay, we'll be sure to update this post. What do you think of the new GS pay scale changes? Share your thoughts in the comments below.<doc-sep>Update: The U.S. House passed the funding bill 300-128 Thursday night. President Trump is expected to sign the measure. Earlier: The compromise spending bill that includes money for President Trump’s border barrier would also give federal civilian workers a pay raise. The measure – passed 83 to 16 by the Senate Thursday – includes a 1.9 percent across-the-board raise for federal workers. The pay raise would be retroactive to Jan. 1 and is a half a percentage point more than last year’s increase. Uniformed military personnel had earlier received a 2.6 percent pay increase. Congress has until midnight Friday to approve the measure and avoid another partial government shutdown. Several federal agencies were closed for 35 days from December to January during the impasse over Trump’s funding request for a border wall. About 400,000 federal employees remained on the job during the shutdown and another 400,000 were furloughed; neither group was paid until the government reopened. President Trump has earlier signed an executive order freezing federal employee pay in 2019 and nullifying any pay raise. The Congressional action would override the order and boost pay for federal workers. The current bill contains $1.375 billion in funding for a barrier at the U.S./Mexico border, far less than the $5 billion requested by the president. Senate Leader Mitch McConnell indicated Thursday the president will sign the measure, despite the funding difference. The House could vote on the measure as soon as tonight.<doc-sep>Update: Both the Senate and House have passed the spending bill, and the White House said the president will sign it. The members of Congress tasked with hashing out a plan to avert another government shutdown want to give federal employees a raise, defying President Donald Trump’s previous efforts to freeze their pay. The funding deal put together by Senate negotiators calls for a 1.9 percent across-the-board raise for government employees for 2019, half a percentage point more than their pay hike last year. The GOP-controlled Senate is expected to approve the bill Thursday, sending it to the Democratic-controlled House, where it also faces favorable odds. The White House has not yet indicated whether the president will sign the legislation. The package includes $1.4 billion in funding for a physical barrier along the southwestern border — far short of the $5.7 billion Trump previously demanded. In fact, the deal is worse for Trump than he could have had in December, when he said he would “proudly” shut down the government to secure more money for a wall he used to promise Mexico would pay for. But he was blamed more than Democrats for the record-setting 35-day shutdown and may accept the deal in order to avoid further political damage. If he does, the legislation will mark a retreat for Trump not just on the wall but also in his political fight with the federal workforce. Since taking office in 2017, Trump has tried to weaken government job protections and peel back collective bargaining rights, lumping civil servants in with what he calls “the swamp.” He has also periodically wielded the threat of a government pay freeze, even while boasting about a strong economy and rising wages in the private sector. After the Senate proposed a 1.9 percent increase last year for 2019, he sent a letter to Congress saying he wanted to nullify it. He essentially said the government couldn’t afford to pay any raises, even though Republicans recently passed tax cuts expected to increase the deficit by nearly $2 trillion through 2028. Even though a majority in the House — controlled at the time by the GOP — never signed off on a pay increase, an automatic 2.1 percent increase would have gone into effect anyway on Jan. 1., because of the federal pay schedule. But Trump intervened to block it, resetting the pay hike to zero through executive order. The government was partially shut down at the time, with roughly 800,000 workers going without paychecks. A union for federal employees said Trump was “pouring salt into the wound” by pre-empting a raise when so many workers were furloughed or working without pay. The 1.9 percent increase in the spending proposal would be the largest since 2009, though still below the raises that preceded the recession. But now it would be much tougher for Trump politically to reject a modest across-the-board hike after a damaging shutdown. By and large, Americans sympathized with federal workers who were subjected to more than a month of financial anxiety through no fault of their own. In one U.S. poll, respondents said, 50 percent to 35 percent, that Trump should have compromised to avoid the funding lapse. The National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association, an advocacy group for federal workers, called the pay increase proposed in the potential spending deal “long overdue common sense.” “This average 1.9 percent pay increase is a small, yet positive, step to ensure the federal government can recruit and retain the best of the best for the benefit of the American people,” said the group’s president, Ken Thomas. Federal workers have faced some lean raises in recent years, compared with historical standards. Then-President Barack Obama oversaw a three-year pay freeze in the wake of the Great Recession, though he tried to end it earlier than planned but was stymied by Republicans. Federal employees can still get raises through step increases during a pay freeze, but those depend on tenure and pay grade and aren’t available to everyone in a given year. The 1.4 percent pay increase in 2018 was the largest across-the-board pay bump in eight years. Each of the four preceding years saw a 1.0 percent increase. The 1.9 percent increase in the spending proposal would be the largest since 2009, though still below the raises that preceded the recession. If Congress passes the spending bill and Trump signs it ― they have until Friday night to avoid a shutdown ― federal government employees will make out much better than government contractors. While the former were granted backpay by Congress after the last shutdown, the latter missed out on several weeks’ worth of earnings while federal offices and functions were closed. Democrats and some Republicans tried to insert a provision in the current proposal to get those workers backpay, but it became a sticking point for GOP leaders. Ultimately, it was left out. “I don’t think we should at this moment let it get in the way of funding the government on Friday,” Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo. ), one of the GOP members involved in negotiations, told HuffPost on Wednesday.<doc-sep>The Washington-Baltimore metro zone is among the areas where federal pay is deemed to be the furthest behind, meaning it would receive one of the larger raises. In January 2018, for example, a 1.9 percent average raise that was split roughly the same way resulted in a raise of just under 2.3 percent in that region. That zone includes not only those cities and their immediate suburbs but also much of the rest of Maryland and Northern Virginia and parts of eastern West Virginia and south-central Pennsylvania.<doc-sep>
Thanks to the spending bill that just became law, federal employees will have a pay raise in 2019, overriding the pay freeze that was previously in place. Despite the pay freeze that went into effect just before the start of the year, a pay raise has been implemented as part of a new spending bill just passed by Congress and signed into law by President Trump to fund the government for the remainder of the fiscal year. Congress has authorized a 1.9% pay increase in the spending bill that was passed to avoid another partial government shutdown at the end of the week. It will be retroactive to the start of 2019. Locality Pay and Its Impact on Salaries Note that the average increase will be 1.9%. That has happened in the past and what it means is that there is an across the board increase of 1.4% with an additional amount for locality pay adjustments. In 2017, for example, there was an across-the-board increase of 1%. Federal employees in San Francisco received 1.32% and those in the Washington, DC area received a raise of 1.26%. In 2018, there was an average pay raise of 1.9%. Employees in the Washington, DC area received a pay raise of 2.29%. The “Rest of the U.S.” category received a raise of 1.67%. There will be similar disparities in 2019 under the bill that was just signed into law. These will not be known for certain until OPM releases the finalized list of pay tables reflecting the new annual salaries that contain the 1.9% pay increase. Why 1.9%? Late in 2018, the Senate included language in a bill that would have provided a 1.9% pay raise for federal employees. That was not approved by the House. No final appropriations bill was approved in Congress late last year for the 2019 fiscal year. After the mid-term elections, the House passed a bill that would have provided a raise of 2.6% to override the pay freeze that had taken effect. This amount was based in part on providing civilian employees the same percentage increase as military personnel. Companion legislation for a 2.6% pay raise was introduced in the Senate. It was unlikely that these bills would have made it out of Congress and become law. Congress ultimately reverted back to the 1.9% figure that had been approved by the Senate previously, probably because lawmakers pushing for the pay raise for federal employees felt it had a better chance of getting approved. Whatever the reasoning, the tactic of putting the pay raise into a spending bill to avoid a government shutdown worked, and federal employees will now be getting a raise for all of 2019.