What official OPM or DHS payroll data exists showing ICE employee salaries by duty location and grade for 2025?
Executive summary
The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) publishes comprehensive 2025 pay tables — including General Schedule (GS) salary tables, locality pay area definitions, Law Enforcement Officer (LEO) locality tables, and numerous locality-specific PDF salary tables — which collectively allow calculation of a federal employee’s pay by grade, step and duty-location locality (e.g., Washington D.C., Boston, Denver) for 2025 [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]. The supplied materials do not include a DHS- or ICE-published payroll roster that directly lists individual ICE employees’ salaries broken down by duty location and grade; instead, OPM’s public pay tables are the official source for computing pay once an employee’s grade/step and locality are known [6] [2].
1. What official OPM payroll data exists for 2025 and how it maps to duty location and grade
OPM’s official 2025 portfolio includes a national General Schedule (GS) table covering annual rates by grade and step and a set of locality pay area definitions that map duty-station locations to locality percentages, enabling derivation of pay for any GS employee in 2025 [1] [2]. In addition to the base GS table, OPM publishes separate locality-area PDF salary tables (examples for Washington-Baltimore-Arlington DCB, Boston BOS, Denver DEN, Rest of U.S. RUS, and Southern SO among others) that incorporate the January 2025 1.7% GS increase and the applicable locality percentages, giving ready-made annual rates by grade and step for each locality [3] [4] [5] [7] [8].
2. Law enforcement and special-rate coverage relevant to ICE roles
OPM maintains a dedicated Law Enforcement Officer (LEO) 2025 locality-pay resource and special-rate guidance for LEOs under statutory authorities that can produce pay rates higher than ordinary locality tables for qualifying positions; these LEO tables and section-5305 special rates explicitly apply to employees who meet the legal definition of “law enforcement officer,” which is often relevant to many ICE positions [9]. OPM also issues special rate tables and guidance where recruitment and retention problems justify higher pay; analysts and job postings use those tables to determine whether particular ICE job series or duty locations fall under special-rate coverage [10] [9].
3. What is and is not in the public record: official tables versus agency payroll rosters
The official, public OPM artifacts are pay policy documents and tabulated salary tables by grade/step and locality — not agency payroll rosters of individual employees with names, positions, and duty-station pay entries [1] [2]. The provided search results point to OPM’s salary and locality materials but do not include a DHS- or ICE-published dataset that lists ICE employee salaries by duty location and grade in granular payroll form; therefore researchers must map known ICE job grades and duty stations onto OPM’s 2025 tables to calculate likely pay rather than retrieve a pre-made ICE payroll export from these sources [6] [2].
4. How to reconstruct ICE pay by duty location and grade using OPM files (method, not a data dump)
Because OPM’s 2025 GS/LEO and locality tables provide grade-and-step base rates plus locality multipliers, one reconstructs a specific ICE employee’s 2025 pay by identifying the employee’s pay plan and grade (e.g., GS/GL and step), confirming whether the position qualifies as a LEO or for a special rate, determining the duty-station locality area from OPM’s locality-area definitions, and then applying the appropriate table or special-rate entry — a process described in OPM’s pay guidance and illustrated across the 2025 tables and locality PDFs [1] [9] [2] [3]. The sources supplied include concrete locality PDFs that already show the combined 2025 annual rates for those localities [3] [4].
5. Limitations, alternative sources, and agendas to watch
The supplied OPM pages are authoritative for federal pay policy and published rates [1] [2], but they are not a substitute for an agency payroll extract; if a user seeks an ICE- or DHS-produced file that explicitly lists salaries by named employee, duty station and grade, those are not present in the materials provided here and would require a DHS disclosure, FOIA request, or an internal payroll release beyond the OPM rate tables [6]. Advocacy groups, journalists, or contractors who publish aggregated ICE pay analyses typically reconstruct figures using the same OPM tables together with HR-grade data or vacancy announcements; such reconstructions should be treated as derived, not as direct official payroll dumps [10].