How to Look Up a Federal Employee's Salary

Yes—individual salary information is generally releasable for most covered federal civilian employees, though source coverage and security redactions can keep a name out of a search. OPM provides workforce data, while a named-employee search depends on a payroll database, its reporting year, and disclosure rules. Use OPM’s Federal Workforce Data for workforce-level context, then use FederalPay’s employee lookup when you need to identify a specific person. If no record appears for a General Schedule position, use the employee’s grade, step, and duty station to estimate the current GS rate.

Where to find official federal salary data

The Office of Personnel Management stores federal workforce information in the Enterprise Human Resources Integration Statistical Data Mart, usually shortened to EHRI-SDM. According to OPM’s Federal Employment Reports, the data available through EHRI-SDM covers more than two million federal civilian employees and includes occupations, employing agencies, salaries, promotions, awards, and other personnel transactions.

OPM also says EHRI is an automated system covering about 96 percent of federal civilian non-Postal Executive Branch employees. That scope matters: it is broad workforce data, but not a universal directory of every person employed by the federal government.

OPM launched Federal Workforce Data in January 2026 as an online tool for accessing and analyzing EHRI data elements. Check the reporting period displayed with every output before comparing it with current pay; the cited OPM description does not establish a fixed refresh cadence. For most employees, OPM’s December 2024 Data Release Policy describes individual-level records that can include a name, job title, grade level, position description, duty station, and salary.

Salary information for Postal Service employees

Postal Service employees fall outside the non-Postal population covered by OPM’s EHRI system. The Postal Service’s FOIA special-categories guidance says that, except for law-enforcement personnel, the public information for current or former Postal Service employees includes name, job title, grade, current salary, duty station, and dates of employment.

The USPS page identifies the public fields but does not identify a searchable name database or a specific request procedure. This guide therefore does not verify a USPS name-search database. Do not treat an empty result from an OPM-based search as evidence that a Postal employee has no public record.

Narrowing a search by name, agency, or title

Start with the person’s full name at FederalPay’s employee lookup. FederalPay describes the tool as a searchable database of federal civilian employees that can search for individual government employees across millions of employees at hundreds of agencies.

FederalPay does not state a fixed fiscal-year range or promise agency, title, or location filters in its cited description of the lookup tool. Record the years shown on the live database, and rely only on the search controls it actually displays.

Before treating a result as a likely match, compare any displayed agency, occupation or title, location, reporting year, and salary with the details you already know. Keep the data year with your notes so you do not mistake an older reported figure for current pay.

When you know an agency, title, or duty location but not a full name, use those details to evaluate or narrow results if the database exposes them. An agency paired with an occupation or job title is usually more useful than a title alone. For titles used across multiple agencies, compare the agency, location, and listed salary before accepting the first similarly named result.

If an exact name produces no likely match, try a reasonable variation, such as a first initial with a last name or a version without a middle name. A blank result is not enough to establish why a person is absent.

Why an employee’s name may not appear

Start with the source’s scope. OPM says EHRI covers about 96 percent of federal civilian non-Postal Executive Branch employees, so an OPM-based result cannot serve as a universal federal employee directory. A missing record does not establish that a person is not federally employed.

OPM’s December 2024 Data Release Policy also allows identity and organizational-code information to be redacted for security or sensitive agencies. A blank result cannot show whether redaction applies to a particular person. After confirming the source’s scope, a spelling variation remains another possibility.

How to estimate pay from grade, step, and duty station

When an individual record is unavailable, a General Schedule grade and step can provide a scheduled annual-rate estimate. OPM’s 2026 General Schedule table lists annual rates by grade and step and incorporates a 1 percent General Schedule increase effective in January 2026.

Confirm that the position uses the General Schedule, then find the row for the grade and the column for the step. Their intersection is the scheduled base rate before locality pay.

Next, use the locality percentage that applies to the employee’s official duty station. The 2026 Federal Register notice says locality payments from 17.06 percent to 46.34 percent apply to GS employees across 58 locality pay areas. For a simple estimate, multiply the base rate by one plus the locality percentage. For example, $60,000 multiplied by 1.1706 equals $70,236 using the published 17.06 percent rate. That is an illustration of the calculation, not a specific person’s pay.

Keep the base rate and locality percentage from the same effective year. If the grade or step is uncertain, calculate the plausible combinations as a range rather than presenting one figure as confirmed.

Treat the result as a position-based scheduled rate, not proof of a specific employee’s current earnings. Confirm the grade, step, and duty station before using it in an offer or career decision.

What a published salary leaves out

A published annual GS salary is a scheduled rate, not a complete measure of total compensation. Keep the base rate and locality-adjusted scheduled rate distinct, then track overtime, awards, any other premium pay, and benefits or retirement value separately.

OPM’s 2026 spreadsheet documentation says its spreadsheet contains General Schedule rates of pay and separately identifies hourly overtime rates for step 1. Keep overtime separate from an annual salary rate.

OPM’s Federal Employment Reports list salaries and awards as separate information in EHRI-SDM. When an award is verified, list it separately rather than relabeling it as annual salary.

Those sources do not make the salary field a complete total-compensation figure. A published salary alone does not establish whether an employee received other premium pay or what their benefits and retirement are worth. If those items matter, obtain separate documentation and label missing values as unknown rather than treating salary plus overtime and awards as complete.

Using the figure in a career comparison

When comparing federal pay with a private-sector offer, start with the locality-adjusted scheduled annual rate. Then put verified overtime, awards, other premium pay, and benefits or retirement value on separate lines. Keep unknown values unknown so the published salary is not mistaken for total compensation.

Once you have a reliable federal salary figure, FedUp.work can help turn that benchmark into private-sector role targets that match your public-service experience. Keep the grade, step, locality-adjusted rate, separately documented pay, and benefits information in view as you compare options.