Government Pay Calculators
Federal civilian and military compensation systems are uniquely structured -- with grade-and-step pay tables, locality adjustments, special pay, allowances, and retirement benefits that differ significantly from private-sector packages. Our government pay calculators are built to handle these nuances so you can understand exactly what you earn today and what you can expect in retirement.
The GS pay calculator looks up your base pay and applies the correct locality adjustment for your duty station across all 15 grades and 10 steps. The military pay calculator covers base pay, Basic Allowance for Housing (BAH), Basic Allowance for Subsistence (BAS), and total compensation for every rank and years of service. The FERS retirement calculator estimates your Federal Employees Retirement System annuity based on your high-3 salary and years of creditable service. And the TSP calculator projects your Thrift Savings Plan balance at retirement, accounting for your contributions, the agency automatic 1%, and matching contributions up to 5%.
GS Pay Calculator
Look up federal GS pay with locality adjustments for all grades 1-15 and steps 1-10.
Military Pay Calculator
Calculate military base pay, BAH, BAS, and total compensation for all ranks and years of service.
FERS Retirement Calculator
Estimate your Federal Employees Retirement System annuity based on years of service and high-3 salary.
TSP Calculator
Project your Thrift Savings Plan balance at retirement with government matching contributions.
How federal and military compensation is actually built
The GS scale is base pay times a locality multiplier
General Schedule pay has two components that people frequently conflate. There is a nationwide base table of 15 grades, GS-1 through GS-15, each with 10 steps, and there is a locality percentage applied on top of it according to where the position is based. The locality adjustment is not small. It ranges from a Rest of US figure applied everywhere outside the defined areas to substantially larger percentages in high-cost metros, so the same GS-12 Step 5 position can differ by tens of thousands of dollars between two duty stations with identical grade and step.
Progression through the steps is largely time-based rather than performance-based, and the waiting periods lengthen as you go: one year each between steps 1 to 4, two years each between steps 4 to 7, and three years each between steps 7 to 10, so moving from step 1 to step 10 takes 18 years without a promotion. Grade promotions move faster and are worth far more than steps. The GS pay calculator combines grade, step and locality, which is the only way to compare two federal offers in different cities honestly.
Military pay is mostly the parts that are not basic pay
Basic pay is set by pay grade and years of service and is fully taxable, but for most service members it is well under the total value of compensation. The Basic Allowance for Housing and the Basic Allowance for Subsistence are the two large additions, and critically they are not taxable. That changes the comparison with civilian salary substantially, because a non-taxable allowance is worth more than the same amount of taxable wages, by roughly the reciprocal of your marginal rate.
BAH is set by duty station zip code, pay grade and dependency status, which means it varies enormously across assignments and is the main reason two service members at the same rank can have very different standards of living. Special and incentive pays sit on top for flight duty, hazardous duty, sea duty and certain skills. When comparing a military package against a civilian offer, the honest method is to gross up the non-taxable allowances to their taxable equivalent before adding them to basic pay, which is what the military pay calculator is for.
FERS is three separate benefits, not one pension
The Federal Employees Retirement System has three legs, and evaluating any one in isolation gives a misleading picture. The first is the FERS basic annuity, a defined-benefit pension calculated from your high-3 average salary, your years of creditable service and a multiplier: 1 percent per year in the general case, rising to 1.1 percent for those who retire at 62 or later with at least 20 years of service. Thirty years of service at the 1 percent multiplier produces 30 percent of high-3 salary for life, indexed for inflation.
The second leg is Social Security, which FERS employees pay into and receive normally, unlike the older CSRS system. The third is the Thrift Savings Plan, which carries the agency contributions. Taken together the three are designed to replace a substantial share of pre-retirement income, but the annuity alone is not intended to, and the common mistake is judging the whole package by the pension multiplier while ignoring the TSP match that does much of the work.
The TSP match is the highest-value decision a federal employee makes
The Thrift Savings Plan matches on a specific schedule: an automatic 1 percent of basic pay regardless of what you contribute, a dollar-for-dollar match on the first 3 percent you contribute, and 50 cents on the dollar for the next 2 percent. Contributing 5 percent of your salary therefore attracts 5 percent from the agency, for a total of 10 percent going in. Contributing less than 5 percent leaves guaranteed money behind, and no fund selection or market timing decision comes close to that in value.
The TSP's other advantage is cost. Its expense ratios are among the lowest available in any retirement plan, and the difference compounds: a fraction of a percent in annual fees becomes a large sum across a thirty-year career. The L funds handle allocation automatically by target date, while the individual funds cover government securities, fixed income, large-cap, small-cap and international equity. Run the TSP calculator with and without the full match to see the size of the gap, since that single comparison usually settles the contribution question.