Virginia State Pay in 2024: Where the Numbers Actually Live and What They Miss
If you are trying to figure out what a Virginia state job pays right now, you will spend more time hunting than you expect. The data is scattered across a few different sites and nobody put it in one place. I worked through this process last fall when someone on our team needed benchmarking numbers for a classification we were re-evaluating. What follows is the actual path that worked. The main source is the Virginia Department of Human Resource Management (DHRM). They publish annual salary schedules for state positions. For 2024, the key document is the General Wage Increase and pay schedule update that the Commonwealth released in spring. The base pay structures for most white-collar classifications ran between roughly $38,000 and $135,000 depending on level, with some technical and professional categories going higher. The changes from 2023 to 2024 were modest — generally a 2 to 4 percent bump across the board for most classifications, though some higher-level roles saw slightly more. There is no single CSV file you can download that has everything you want. The DHRM site hosts PDF schedules and some spreadsheet links, but they are broken up by classification series. You have to go into each one individually. I ended up using a combination approach: pulling the PDF tables for the classifications I needed, then cross-referencing against the Virginia Personnel Action System (VPAS) where possible, and supplementing with Bureau of Labor Statistics data for comparison points in the same metro areas.
The second source most people overlook is the Virginia State Treasurer's office. They publish compensation data for state employees in quarterly reports. It is not as clean as you would want, but it is real dollar figures tied to actual positions. The data goes back years, which matters if you are looking at trends rather than just a snapshot. Here is something beginners miss: state pay in Virginia does not move in lockstep with local government pay. Richmond city employees, Fairfax county workers, and Henrico school division staff all have their own salary schedules. If you are comparing state salaries to "Virginia salaries" broadly, you will get skewed numbers. The state system is its own thing. It tends to lag local government slightly in base pay for mid-level professional roles, but it makes up for it with pension benefits that are harder to quantify from a simple salary table. The Virginia Retirement System calculations are where the real comp difference sits. A state employee making $65,000 with VRS might actually be better compensated total than a local government employee making $72,000 without the same retirement structure. I have seen hiring managers ignore this and make offers based on base salary alone, which creates retention problems within two years.
One edge case I ran into: the 2024 pay schedules include some positions that were reclassified during the fiscal year. The DHRM tables show the new grade but not always the transition path from the old grade. I had a situation where an employee was moved from a GS-5 to a GS-6 equivalent, but the salary schedule did not clearly map the step progression for someone already on a higher step in the old classification. The workaround was to pull the individual's personnel action form from VPAS and trace the exact date of reclassification, then apply the old schedule's step-to-grade conversion manually. It took about forty-five minutes per person instead of ten. If you are doing this analysis for multiple positions, there is a faster route. Export the DHRM salary schedules to Excel, then use a pivot table to group by classification series and step. You can pull the minimum, midpoint, and maximum for each band in under twenty minutes once the data is cleaned. The cleaning part is what eats time — the PDFs are not formatted consistently, and some older schedules still use the old alphanumeric grading system alongside the newer one. A couple of things to watch for. The 2024 data includes temporary wage adjustments for inflation that were approved mid-year, so if you are comparing Q1 numbers to Q3 numbers, they are not directly comparable without adjusting for the increase. Also, geographic differentials exist but are not uniform. Some Hampton Roads positions carry a slight cost-of-labor adjustment that the base schedule does not reflect. Check the or supplementary notes in each schedule PDF — they are easy to skip over.
Get the Full Details
For the most accurate picture, I would recommend combining three sources: the DHRM salary schedules for base pay, the State Treasurer's quarterly reports for actual paid compensation, and BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics for regional context. That triangulation closes the gaps that any single source leaves open.
