How one defines “fair” is always up for debate, particularly when it comes to money.
Case in point: the annual debate over how much of a raise federal employees should get next year. President Obama said it should be 1.3% when the White House released its budget proposal earlier this year.
But then, some lawmakers quickly proposed legislation to make the 2016 pay raise 3.8%.
Federal employees were also petitioning the White House for a “meaningful pay raise,” although they never clearly defined what that should be, but presumably one larger than what the president has proposed. As of the time of this writing, that petition has a long way to go to reach the 100k signatures required for a response.
Last year around this time, as the debate over the annual raise raged on, FedSmith.com users said they thought they should get a 4% pay raise for 2015. AFGE concurred.
The president recently issued a letter directing an across-the-board pay raise of 1%. However, with the possibility of locality pay increases, some federal employees may see an average increase of 1.3%.
We were curious to know what our users thought an appropriate pay increase would be for next year. The most popular answer: 3%.
Here is a summary of how the responses to our survey broke down:
| No raise | 0.68% |
| 1% | 0.58% |
| 1.3% | 1.26% |
| 2% | 7.85% |
| 3% | 34.40% |
| 4% | 26.45% |
| 5% | 15.79% |
| 6% | 4.17% |
| 7% | 0.87% |
| 8% | 1.26% |
| 9% | 0.10% |
| 10% | 2.81% |
| > 10% | 3.20% |
Other responses were 2.5% and 3.5%. One ambitious respondent said it should be 25%.
It’s looking increasingly likely that the latest proposal from the president of an across-the-board 1% increase will be the final number for 2016, but whatever the final figure is, we will continue to keep our users abreast of the latest news.
