Under the complex law governing raises for federal workers, a raise is paid by default if Congress does not legislate a figure for the following year. President Obama early this year proposed a 1.6 percent increase, but as Congress began drafting spending bills, it did not directly address a raise.

In an August order, Obama set the 1.6 percent number as the default amount should Congress continue to remain silent. In that order, he further stated his intent to split that raise, paying 1 percentage point across the board and dividing funds equivalent to 0.6 percent of the federal payroll in varying amounts by locality.

Under the locality pay system for employees paid under the General Schedule, which applies to most white-collar federal employees below the senior ranks, there are 44 city zones, whose boundaries are drawn according to standard statistical definitions and commuting patterns from outlying areas; a catchall locality which covers areas in the contiguous states outside those zones; and separate localities for the entirety of both Alaska and Hawaii.

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The message sent Tuesday to Congress sets specific raises for those localities, based on recent recommendations from an advisory council that uses Labor Department data to measure the local “pay gaps” between federal and private-sector workers. Those figures reflect salaries for comparable jobs in local labor markets and do not take into account the value of employee benefits or non-monetary factors associated with employment.

The message is needed to prevent a much larger increase from taking effect under that law, one large enough to virtually close the indicated pay gaps. That would cost $26 billion, and “federal agency budgets cannot sustain such increases,” the message says.

“Civilian Federal employees made significant sacrifices as a result of the 3-year pay freeze that ended in January 2014. Since the pay freeze ended, annual adjustments for civilian Federal employees have also been lower than private sector pay increases and statutory formulas for adjustments to the General Schedule for 2014 through 2016. However, we must maintain efforts to keep our Nation on a sustainable fiscal course. This is an effort that continues to require tough choices under current economic conditions,” the message says.

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The result is that the raises — which are effective as of the first full pay period of the new year—are to vary from slightly above to slightly below the 1.6 percent figure. The smallest, 1.34 percent, will be in the “rest of the U.S.” locality. Other city areas at the low end include Cincinnati, Indianapolis and Albuquerque.

The Washington-Baltimore locality where the raise will be the largest covers a sprawling area encompassing not only those two cities but also much of Maryland and Northern Virginia and parts of eastern West Virginia and south-central Pennsylvania. The 2.02 percent amount is just above the increases to be paid in the Laredo, Tex., San Diego and San Francisco areas, with Alaska and the New York and Los Angeles areas just behind them.

Locality pay is paid according to where employees work, not where they live.

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With Congress still in session, there remains an outside chance that a pay raise number will be enacted, which would override those figures. However, this year legislators have followed the pattern of the three previous years of allowing the White House’s recommended raise to take effect through silence.

The raise formula technically applies only to General Schedule employees, but under long-standing practice, raises for blue-collar employees — who are under a separate locality-based pay system — are set according to the General Schedule amounts in their areas.

Raises for white-collar employees at senior levels, most of them in the Senior Executive Service, are not automatic and are linked instead to performance ratings.