First pay raise in a decade for some top feds

Thousands of top-level career feds, some of whom haven’t had a pay raise in years, will be getting a little something extra in their check when the 2019 pay raise clicks in. The raise, which also covers more than 1 million white collar civil servants, is expected to show up in mid-March for most people.

It will go to many members of the career General Schedule and the Senior Executive Services. For many political appointees it will be the first salary increase in 10 years.

The retroactive-to-January increase is 1.9 percent, with 1.4 going to everybody eligible and the remaining 0.5 percent earmarked for locality pay. That’s based in part on pay for similar jobs in the private sector in each locality area. The last time there was 1.9 percent raise feds in the Rest of the U.S. (RUS) got the smallest increase. Workers in the Washington, D.C.-Baltimore area got the biggest at 2.2 percent.

Currently, hundreds of GS-15 employees are capped at $164,200. That extends down to steps 8, 9 and 10 in the Washington-Baltimore area, and down to step 5 in San Francisco-San Jose.

The Professional Manager’s Association recently sent this out to their membership, which was provided to PMA by the IRS Human Capital Officer:

“Employees under high-level pay systems such as the SES do not get locality pay since they are in pay-for-performance systems, but the pay cap applying to them — in most cases, currently $189,600 — would increase by the 1.9 percent average. The pay cap applying to GS employees in the upper steps of GS-15 in some localities, $164,200, also would increase by that percentage.

“Also, for the first time since 2010, political appointees under the executive schedule are to receive a raise of 1.9 percent. Over that time the amounts actually paid to them have stayed the same even while the underlying rates have increased for purposes of increasing the pay caps. Pay for members of Congress is to remain frozen, however.”

Nearly Useless Factoid

By Amelia Brust

Jerry Merryman, who died last week and was one of the inventors of the pocket calculator, got his start in electronics as a child. When he was about 11 years old, his local police would call on him to fix their radios.

Source: NBC News

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