Federal civilian employees are on track to open their first paycheck of 2027 and find the same General Schedule base and locality pay rates they earned throughout 2026. On August 26, 2026, the White House sent Congress a pay plan that freezes those rates rather than letting the usual annual adjustment formula run its course. A separate track carves out federal law enforcement personnel for a raise, but for most of the federal workforce, the plan means building next year’s household budget around a paycheck that holds still while nearly everything else keeps costing more. The numbers behind that freeze, and the exception carved out of it, come from a specific piece of federal pay law and from OPM’s own account of how it applied that law this year.
The Alternative Pay Plan Locks GS and Locality Rates at 2026 Levels
Federal pay law does not leave a president free to set salaries by preference alone. Under 5 U.S.C. 5303(b), a president may replace the standard, formula-driven pay adjustment with his own numbers only when he judges that formula’s result inappropriate “because of national emergency or serious economic conditions affecting the general welfare,” and only after telling Congress first, along with an assessment of what the change will do to the government’s ability to recruit and hold onto employees.
That is the authority the administration used on August 26, 2026, when it transmitted an alternative pay plan to Congress announcing that 2027 General Schedule base and locality rates will hold at 2026 levels for most of the federal workforce, according to the Office of Personnel Management’s own explanation of the plan. The freeze applies to employees under the General Schedule and certain other statutory pay systems, meaning no across-the-board increase and no locality-table adjustment for another year.
That is a sharper move than the plan the same authority produced twelve months earlier. The pay plan issued in August 2025 provided a 1 percent across-the-board increase for General Schedule employees effective January 2026, with law enforcement personnel layered on top of that base increase for a combined raise. This year’s plan drops the general increase to zero and routes the entire law enforcement raise through a different legal channel instead of the General Schedule.
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Law Enforcement Gets a 3.8 Percent Increase Through a Separate Pay Authority
The carve-out for law enforcement personnel does not run through the General Schedule pay tables at all. OPM says it will use its special salary rate authority under 5 U.S.C. 5305 and 5 CFR 530, subpart C, to raise pay for covered law enforcement employees by 3.8 percent after consulting with the agencies that employ them. Special rates are a separate pay track OPM has long used to address recruiting and retention problems in specific occupations or locations, and they count as basic pay for retirement, overtime and other computations.
Coverage is not settled yet. OPM has said the 2027 approach will be broader than the categories covered by the 2026 special rates, which were limited to specified front-line law enforcement positions at agencies including the FBI, the DEA, the ATF, the Bureau of Prisons, Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Secret Service. Which occupations make the 2027 list, and at which agencies, depends on the consultation OPM has not yet finished with those agencies.
A $197,200 Cap Limits Who Sees the Full Raise
Even employees covered by the law enforcement special rates will not all see the same 3.8 percent bump. Special salary rates are subject to a statutory cap set at the rate for level IV of the Executive Schedule, $197,200, and OPM has confirmed that figure will again be the ceiling on the 2027 special rates. Employees already at that cap will receive no increase at all, and those close to it will get less than the full 3.8 percent.
The Final Pay Tables Are Still Pending
Nothing here is final in dollar terms yet. OPM says it anticipates releasing the new special rate tables sometime before the end of the calendar year, once it finishes working out coverage with the agencies involved, and it has attached a tentative effective date of January 10, 2027, the start of the first full pay period of the new year. The freeze on general base and locality rates does not need a new table to take effect; that freeze is already the substance of what the administration transmitted to Congress on August 26. It is only the size and reach of the law enforcement increase that remain to be worked out in tables OPM has not yet published.
The Legal Requirement Behind the Law Enforcement Exception
Part of what the law requires when a president substitutes his own pay plan is an accounting of what the change will do to the government’s ability to recruit and keep employees. OPM’s own framing points to exactly that rationale for exempting law enforcement: without the special rates, the agency says, the government “may find it difficult to recruit and retain personnel” in positions tied to border security, federal law enforcement and public safety. That recruitment argument was not extended to the rest of the federal workforce, and barring a change from Congress or a further pay plan, the 2026 pay rate is the number most federal employees should expect to see again on their first paycheck of 2027.
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This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor. Figures are linked to their primary sources; where a claim could not be verified from the public record, we say so.
