Federal employees who want to know what January 2027 will bring in their paychecks will find nothing official to read. The Office of Personnel Management has published pay tables through 2026 and none for 2027, and the pages read for this article show no 2027 pay order either. That leaves the size of next year’s raise unsettled, a narrower word than frozen or cut.
OPM’s pay page stops at 2026
The agency’s salaries and wages page lists pay years from 2026 back to 2019. Under 2026 it carries five sets of tables: the General Schedule and locality pay, the Law Enforcement Officer locality tables, the Wildland Firefighter tables, the Executive and Senior Level tables and the special rate tables. Nothing is listed for 2027, and no announcement about a 2027 adjustment appears on the page, which was read on October 1, 2026.
The 2026 section points to a single authority, the Executive Order for 2026 Pay Schedules. No link to an alternative pay plan for 2027 appears on the page.
What Executive Order 14368 did for 2026
That order is Executive Order 14368, “Adjustments of Certain Rates of Pay,” signed by President Donald J. Trump on December 18, 2025. Its first section sets the rates of the statutory pay systems “as set forth on the schedules attached hereto.” Uniformed services pay in Schedule 8 took effect January 1, 2026, and the civilian schedules start on “the first day of the first applicable pay period beginning on or after January 1, 2026.”
The timing is the pattern worth noticing. The order for 2026 arrived on December 18 of the year before, two weeks before the new year. A comparable order for 2027 would not have to exist yet for the usual calendar to hold, and its absence in early October is not by itself a sign of a decision either way.
The statute’s default and its September 1 marker
The law that governs the yearly adjustment, section 5303 of Title 5, sets a default. Absent a presidential alternative plan, pay rates rise by a percentage equal to one-half of one percentage point less than the growth in the Employment Cost Index. The statute also says an alternative plan, for use when the President finds the standard adjustment inappropriate because of a national emergency or serious economic conditions, must go to Congress “before September 1 of the preceding calendar year.”
None of the pages read says whether such a plan was sent for 2027. The OPM page links to none, and the White House order read is the 2025 one. This article therefore does not describe a freeze, a cut or a guaranteed formula raise as the outcome. Any of those would require a source that the official record, as read, does not provide.
The 3.8 percent figure covers law enforcement, not the General Schedule
The only percentage in the 2026 order is 3.8, and it is narrow. The order directs the OPM Director to determine “whether to provide up to a total increase of 3.8 percent (inclusive of the increase provided under Section 1)” to the pay of “certain Federal civilian law enforcement personnel.” The text of the order gives no general percentage for General Schedule employees; the rates sit in the attached schedules.
A household that sees 3.8 percent quoted as a federal raise may be looking at a ceiling for one group of employees in one year. It is not a General Schedule raise and says nothing about 2027.
What a federal household can and cannot plan against
For budgeting, the practical effect is a blank. Withholding, a mortgage preapproval based on expected income, childcare costs and January savings contributions normally rest on the next published table. Until OPM posts one, a household has the 2026 schedule as the last official rate and nothing to compare it with.
Planning on the 2026 rates as the floor for the first pay period of January is a reasonable reading of the records, but it is only a planning assumption and not a statement of what the government will pay. Employees whose pay is set by schedules that stay unpublished carry the same uncertainty, including law enforcement and wildland firefighter staff whose tables OPM keeps separately.
Appropriations news that does not mention pay
The House Appropriations Committee’s news page was also read for any sign of federal pay language. Its latest items, from September 17 through September 24, cover Interior and environment funding, appropriators and the White House on United Nations accountability, committee hearings and a national security and State Department subcommittee session. None addresses federal employee pay, and none mentions the Financial Services and General Government subcommittee. The page is therefore silent, not negative, on a 2027 raise.
The controlling record for the headline is OPM’s own pay page, which on October 1, 2026 carries 2026 and no later year.
For households that want a plan for a frozen bank account
The Bank Account & Debt Protection Kit is written for households that want to understand how a creditor can reach money in a bank account, and what a collector must do to prove a debt. It is not tied to this pay news.
The Bank Account & Debt Protection Kit is a 10-page kit with the 2-month bank protection rule, the debt-validation steps and a protected-funds and dispute log.
Look up the 2-month bank protection rule and the debt-validation steps →
This article was written with AI assistance, and every claim about the pay record was checked against the OPM, White House and statutory pages linked above.
