Federal employee pay raise 2022

[Anonymous]

confirmed--SES tier 4 cap is raising to $176,300. So the 15 cap will be $176,300. So all y'all capped 15s will get a 4k raise. Happy now?!

[Anonymous]

Yes.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:confirmed--SES tier 4 cap is raising to $176,300. So the 15 cap will be $176,300. So all y'all capped 15s will get a 4k raise. Happy now?!

Where did you see this?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I hate the implication on DCUM that most feds are topped-out 15s. That is the realm of a few niche career paths like law or upper administration. The vast majority of us will spend our entire careers at the worker bee level of GS 9-12. Maybe 13 if we go into management. Barely cracking six figures after decades of service is a real hardship in the DC area.

Depends on the area of work. I work at a federal science agency and a majority of my colleagues are maxed GS-15s. Everyone makes substantially less than private sector counterparts, and recruiting is a major challenge. It is hard to find good people to take management positions because there's nothing in it for them.

Setting aside that GS-15s in professional/STEM fields are significantly underpaid compared to the private sector, GS-15s are making $15,000 less they would be if they had gotten the same increases as other feds. And more significantly, that gap is growing almost every year, with no end in sight.

Unless you meant Medical Doctor, how could people in science in private sectors earn substantially more than $172K? Do not talk about scientists in Pfizer who are probably earning a big bonus because of the vaccine (once in a life time). What kind of scientists in private sectors make substantially more than $172K?

IT security and senior engineering jobs quite regularly pay more than $200k, without even including stock options. Even top-tier academic researchers regularly make more than $200k, not from their academic salary alone, but when you include summer pay and consulting gigs.

Our IT department are contractors. We cannot recruit and retain GS employees in IT. We do have one IT worker who is an employee, but he has been there 25 years and knows absolutely nothing. He refers all IT issues to the contractors as his sole job is to manager as the COR of the IT contract.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:Will the topped-out 15s please stop whining? We are well paid for public sector work, period. If you really think you would do so much better elsewhere, please go. 170k a year is a very nice salary. We do get a pension, social security, and access to one of the lowest-fee, well-managed 401ks out there. Inflation may hit us a bit, but at this salary, you have cushions. I’m a single parent who has no access to child support, and we are just fine. And no, I don’t live in the exurbs or eat ramen to survive, either.

I could see for some of the people at Gs-15s have problem with this salary but most of the other professionals I see leave before it gets there. Working for Govt is not all about money, but also work-life balance, job security, retirement benefits, public service, mission, etc.

Work life balance cannot be stressed enough. I was a paralegal at a private firm and had many occasions where I was staying past 5 to deal with cases. Now? In the feds? 4:30 its a wrap. No ifs, ands or buts about this. No more "Oh shit!, I need! calls" to deal with.

Yep, I'm a fed and I honestly couldn't begin to put a monetary worth on the value of being able to slam shut my laptop at 5:30 on the dot every day and not have to devote an ounce of mental real estate to work until 9 tomorrow, but if I could it would be very high.

I'm a former Fed and if this had been my situation, I probably never would have left. But I was a litigator at a "prestigious" agency and would get emails constantly after leaving work; there was a strong push for face time on evenings/weekends in order to get "noticed", and worst of all, if you wanted to advance, you had to make sure to ingratiate yourself with the supervisors. Some of that was office-specific (I had previously been at a different office of the same agency and some of those things were not present) but on balance I don't work much harder in the private sector than I did as a Fed, and equally importantly, I don't have to deal with the awful nasty politics of my old office.

Well that seems to be the choice you made to climb the career ladder. I'm sure I could advance faster if I chose to do that as well, but I value my free time far more than I value money or job titles. If I were in that situation I'd do the exact same thing I'm doing now and if they told me I had to work evenings and weekends I'd say you'd better put that in writing and give me overtime/credit hours or piss off.

Unfortunately it wasn’t as simple as that. I had friends who had mediocre performance reviews after their supervisors would make not so subtle comments about how they rarely saw them in the office after 5, or asked why they weren’t volunteering for various coordinator duties. Again, maybe my office was an outlier, but the politics and shit talking were beyond the pale. In the end it was a revolving door Fed office so maybe management felt it wasn’t worth improving the toxic politics of the office.

[Anonymous]

so when does this executive order implementing the pay raise get issued typically?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:confirmed--SES tier 4 cap is raising to $176,300. So the 15 cap will be $176,300. So all y'all capped 15s will get a 4k raise. Happy now?!

You realize that still worsens the pay compression problem, don't you? What you're describing is what has been happening most years recently. The pay increases by roughly the same amount as the across-the-board increase, but that doesn't leave room for the adjustments to locality pay.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:some straight talk: this is a weak raise from a president who professed to love him some government employees.

If he didn't have to go through Congress I'd bet my house he'd make it much higher. FACT.

Dems control the House and the Senate. Fact.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:confirmed--SES tier 4 cap is raising to $176,300. So the 15 cap will be $176,300. So all y'all capped 15s will get a 4k raise. Happy now?!

Too low.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:confirmed--SES tier 4 cap is raising to $176,300. So the 15 cap will be $176,300. So all y'all capped 15s will get a 4k raise. Happy now?!

Where did you see this?

Yes, where?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:confirmed--SES tier 4 cap is raising to $176,300. So the 15 cap will be $176,300. So all y'all capped 15s will get a 4k raise. Happy now?!

Too low.

Agreed! But this is gonna be the only way to get any kind of increase. Pay compression will not be dealt with until GS 15 step 1 is the same as step 10. At the current rate—that’s 6 years from now.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Agreed! But this is gonna be the only way to get any kind of increase. Pay compression will not be dealt with until GS 15 step 1 is the same as step 10. At the current rate—that’s 6 years from now.

Not quite. It depends on what you think of as the "current rate," but GS15/1 probably won't hit the cap for at least another 20 years or so.

The pay compression is due to locality pay adjustments—GS gets them, SES (and thus the cap) doesn't. So when the pay increase includes a locality pay adjustment, the cap creeps down the GS scale by that much. In 2011, GS15/1 in DC was $123,758 and the cap (at GS15/9) was $155,500—about 25.6% above GS15/1. In 2021, those numbers are $144,128 and $172,500 (now at GS15/7, and 19.7% above GS15/1), respectively. After ten years, GS15/1 is about 6% closer to the cap than it was in 2011. At that rate, it would take over 30 years for GS15/1 to make up the other 19.7%.

But several of the past 10 years had no pay increases at all, and three of those that did (2014, 2015, 2021) had no locality adjustment. No locality adjustment means no pay compression: SES and GS get the same increase. But even looking at the five years from 2016-2020 when there were locality pay increases, the average for DC was about 1%—which would put GS15/1 at the cap in about 20 years.

Frankly, I doubt that congress will care about GS salary compression at all. They're more likely (but still not very likely, IMO) to decide that SES needs a bump to attract top managers. That would have the side effect of fixing the compression issue at the top of the GS scale, but it wouldn't be the main factor behind a change, if it ever changes at all.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Agreed! But this is gonna be the only way to get any kind of increase. Pay compression will not be dealt with until GS 15 step 1 is the same as step 10. At the current rate—that’s 6 years from now.

Not quite. It depends on what you think of as the "current rate," but GS15/1 probably won't hit the cap for at least another 20 years or so.

The pay compression is due to locality pay adjustments—GS gets them, SES (and thus the cap) doesn't. So when the pay increase includes a locality pay adjustment, the cap creeps down the GS scale by that much. In 2011, GS15/1 in DC was $123,758 and the cap (at GS15/9) was $155,500—about 25.6% above GS15/1. In 2021, those numbers are $144,128 and $172,500 (now at GS15/7, and 19.7% above GS15/1), respectively. After ten years, GS15/1 is about 6% closer to the cap than it was in 2011. At that rate, it would take over 30 years for GS15/1 to make up the other 19.7%.

But several of the past 10 years had no pay increases at all, and three of those that did (2014, 2015, 2021) had no locality adjustment. No locality adjustment means no pay compression: SES and GS get the same increase. But even looking at the five years from 2016-2020 when there were locality pay increases, the average for DC was about 1%—which would put GS15/1 at the cap in about 20 years.

Frankly, I doubt that congress will care about GS salary compression at all. They're more likely (but still not very likely, IMO) to decide that SES needs a bump to attract top managers. That would have the side effect of fixing the compression issue at the top of the GS scale, but it wouldn't be the main factor behind a change, if it ever changes at all.

in short: the difference between a percent increase and a percentage point increase?

[Anonymous]

In 10 years capped 15s might be earning 190k.

[Anonymous]

I said it before--raise the SES Cap by $50-75k and it would temporarily fix the compression issue. That's an easier fix than overhauling the pay system (which needs to happen, but won't)