Biden confirms 5.2% pay raise for US federal government officials
US president Joe Biden has confirmed his plan for a 5.2% average pay increase for federal officials from January next year.
Biden confirmed the increase in a letter to speaker of the House of Representatives Kevin McCarthy and the country’s vice president and president of the Senate, Kamala Harris, where he said the increase was required to “allow the federal government to employ a well-qualified federal workforce on behalf of the American people, keeping pace with prior wage growth in the labour market”.
The letter confirmed the pay increase first set out in his 2024 Budget. The increase will be made up of an across-the-board 4.7% base pay increase, and a locality based pay increase that will average 0.5%, resulting in an overall average increase of 5.2%.
In his letter to McCarthy and Harris, Biden said: “We must attract, recruit, and retain a skilled workforce with fair compensation in order to keep our government running, deliver services, and meet our nation’s challenges today and tomorrow.”
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The pay increase is set under terms of the Federal Employees Pay Comparability Act of 1990. Under the rules of the legislation, pay would be increased to a level that is “equitable and comparable” with similar work in the private sector unless the president concludes that a “national emergency or serious economic conditions affecting the general welfare” require him to set the level.
In practice, this power to decide an alternative pay plan is used every year by presidents to set a uniform pay rate across the federal workforce, and under the approval process, Biden will issue an executive order before the end of the year to implement the increase.
This could be overridden by legislation from Congress to enact a different pay award, but this is not expected to happen in this year’s spending plans.
Biden said that his alternative pay plan “will continue to allow the federal government to employ a well-qualified federal workforce on behalf of the American people, keeping pace with prior wage growth in the labour market”.
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About Richard Johnstone
Richard Johnstone is the executive editor of Global Government Forum, where he helps to produce editorial analysis and insight for the title’s audience of public servants around the world. Before joining GGF, he spent nearly five years at UK-based title Civil Service World, latterly as acting editor, and has worked in public policy journalism throughout his career.
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