To require a review of the methodologies used to determine the amounts of locality-based comparability payments and to require the President's Pay Agent to conduct a pilot program establishing alternative models for determining the amounts of those payments.

This legislation directs a comprehensive review of the current systems used to calculate locality-based pay adjustments for federal employees. Currently, these payments help bridge the salary gap between federal workers and their private-sector counterparts in specific geographic areas like the D.C. metro region. The bill mandates that the President's Pay Agent design and execute a pilot program to test new, alternative methodologies for determining these pay adjustments. For Arlington’s large population of federal employees, this could eventually lead to shifts in how cost-of-living adjustments are calculated and distributed. The ultimate goal of this research is to modernize the compensation framework to ensure that federal pay remains competitive and reflects current economic realities more accurately than the traditional models currently in place.