RL34380 – The Executive Schedule IV Pay Cap on General Schedule Compensation, February 15, 2008
“Annual pay adjustments for about 1.3 million employees under the General Schedule (GS) and certain other systems are governed by Section 529 of P.L. 101509, the Federal Employees Pay Comparability Act of 1990 (FEPCA), which generally requires that covered employees receive an annual basic pay adjustment and a locality-based comparability payment. For the GS pay adjustment that took effect in January 2008, the size of the total pay increase (i.e., the annual adjustment plus locality pay) varied across the 32 pay areas, but averaged 3.5% nationwide. In recent years, though, an increasing number of GS employees have not received all of the base and locality pay increases that were designated for their pay areas. By law (5 U.S.C. ?5304(g)(1)), base GS pay and locality pay combined cannot exceed Level IV of the Executive Schedule (EX-IV) — which, for 2008, is set at $149,000. Therefore, GS employees whose total pay was already equivalent to EX-IV could only receive the same amount of pay increase that was provided to employees in the Executive Schedule (which, for 2008, was 2.5%). Any employees whose pay was below EX-IV but, after the increase, would have been above Level IV, could only receive a portion of the total increase scheduled for other employees in their pay area.
