About Annual Pay Raise
Each year that a Federal pay raise is authorized, the National Finance Center (NFC) coordinates with customer Agencies in order to outline specific requirements and initiate the processing cycle. Federal pay raises as authorized by the President are made effective as of January 1. The Executive Order provides details on any increases for statutory pay systems and locality pay increases for affected pay plans, Agencies, grades, positions, etc. While internal pay raise activities begin in October of each year, Agencies are brought into the mix beginning in November with a kickoff meeting. This kickoff meeting and subsequent status meetings detail the types of information needed from participating Agencies, the methods of submission, the communications plan, and the timelines by which the information is needed.
Upon receipt of the President’s Executive Order, NFC ramps up with a flurry of heavily coordinated activities required to prepare for and implement the annual pay raise, and upon receipt of Agency-specific requirements, NFC develops detailed functional requirements which are used to code the changes within its various processing systems. During this timeframe, NFC also loads salary and pay table data from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) into its databases. After completion of coding, normal production processes are simulated in a test environment where Agencies can perform hands-on testing with their own data; and throughout this process, the community is kept abreast of the progression through a series of Customer Notifications.