A pay grade tells a civilian employer how much responsibility someone carried. These pages take each grade in turn: the titles each service uses, how LockLeed reads the scope, 2026 basic pay, Minneapolis/St. Paul BAH, and what civilians in the matching jobs earn.
Rank and pay grade are not the same thing
DoD's rank guide draws the line clearly. The pay grade (E-1, W-2, O-5) is an administrative classification used mainly to standardize pay across the services: E for enlisted, W for warrant officers, O for commissioned officers. The rank is the title, and it differs by service. An E-6 is a staff sergeant in the Army, a technical sergeant in the Air Force and a petty officer first class in the Navy. Some grades hold two ranks: the Army's corporal and specialist are both E-4s, and the corporal outranks the specialist.
Because the grade is the common denominator, these pages are organized by grade. The junior enlisted grades E-1 to E-3, the warrant officer grades W-1 to W-5, and O-1 and O-2 each share a page; every other grade from E-4 to O-6 has its own. The scope for each grade comes from LockLeed's military résumé decoder.
How the numbers fit together
Every page has three kinds of figures, each from its official source and pulled by script rather than typed: basic pay from the DFAS pay tables effective January 1, 2026; BAH for the Minneapolis/St. Paul military housing area from the DoD rate data behind the BAH calculator; and median civilian wages from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey, May 2025, for Minnesota and the U.S.
They are not directly comparable. BAH and BAS are tax-free allowances paid on top of basic pay, and military health care, retirement and leave are extra again, while a civilian salary is taxed and comes before the employer's benefits. Our guide to converting military pay to a civilian salary shows how to compare like with like. For reference, the median wage across all occupations was $56,920 in Minnesota and $50,980 nationally in May 2025.