2026 AcqDemo Pay Scale: NH, NJ and NK Broadband Salary Ranges

AcqDemo replaces GS grades and steps with broadbands. Each band runs from the step-1 rate of its lowest GS grade to the step-10 rate of its highest, plus locality. DoD has not published a 2026 table — this one is derived from OPM’s 2026 schedule, and the derivation is shown below.

2026 band lookup

Pick a career path, a broadband level and a locality pay area. The result shows the band floor and ceiling, and the GS grades that band spans.

All bands, all three career paths

Base rates before locality, for 2026. The GS span column is the part worth memorising — it is how you translate an AcqDemo offer into something comparable with a GS job advertisement.

Note that the same dollar range appears at different band levels across career paths. NJ-IV and NH-III are both GS-12 to GS-13, so both run $76,463 to $118,204. A band level on its own means nothing without its career path — NJ-IV is the top of the NJ path while NH-III still has a band above it.

Why there is no official 2026 table

DoD’s most recent authoritative broadband table is in the U.S. Army Acquisition Support Center’s Introduction to AcqDemo for New Employees and Supervisors, dated 2025-01, where it is labelled “2025 AcqDemo Broadband Basic Pay Table (w/o Locality Pay)”. No 2026 equivalent has been published.

That matters less than it appears, because the band boundaries are not independent figures. Each band’s floor is the step-1 rate of its lowest GS grade and its ceiling is the step-10 rate of its highest. Once you know a band’s GS span, its dollars follow from the General Schedule.

We checked that rule rather than assuming it. Taking every 2026 boundary derived from OPM’s 2026 table and removing the 1% general increase for 2026 should land back on the published 2025 figure. Across all three career paths that is 22 boundaries: 13 reproduce the published 2025 value to the dollar, and all 22 land within $10. The residual few dollars are OPM rounding each GS cell independently, not a different rule.

So the tables on this page are derived, not published. They are labelled that way deliberately. If DoD publishes a 2026 table that differs, the published table governs.

NH-03 and NH-04 explained

The bands are officially written in Roman numerals, and almost universally typed in Arabic ones. NH-III and NH-03 are the same band; so are NH-IV and NH-04. Searching for one and reading about the other is the most common confusion in this system.

• NH-III / NH-03 — GS-12 to GS-13, $76,463 to $118,204 base. This is where most journeyman and senior acquisition professionals sit.
• NH-IV / NH-04 — GS-14 to GS-15, $107,446 to $164,301 base. The top NH band. There is no NH-05.

The jump from NH-III to NH-IV is the significant one in an AcqDemo career, because it is a promotion in the competitive sense: moving to a band level with a higher maximum pay is a competitive action, so it is announced and competed rather than granted. Movement within a band is not a promotion at all — which is the whole point of banding.

How pay increases without step increases

There are no steps in AcqDemo, no within-grade increases, and no quality step increases. The Contribution Rating Increase replaces all three: per the Army ASC guidance it stands in for “within-grade increases, quality-step increases and promotions between grades that are now banded.” Three separate things can move your money in a year:

• General Pay Increase (GPI) — “the across-the-board basic pay increase authorized by law or the President for the GS pay system.” The same annual adjustment GS employees receive.
• Contribution Rating Increase (CRI) — a permanent increase to basic pay, funded from a pay pool set at not less than 2% of the activity’s basic pay, with the maximum set annually by the DoD Program Manager.
• Contribution Award (CA) — a lump sum that does not raise basic pay.

All three run on the Contribution-based Compensation and Appraisal System (CCAS) cycle: the cycle starts in October with contribution planning, a mid-point review falls in April or May, employee self-assessment runs September to October, pay pool panels meet in November and December, and the end-of-cycle discussion and payout happen in January.

The rails: what decides your increase

AcqDemo plots your Overall Contribution Score against your current basic pay. The resulting chart has a standard pay line with an upper and a lower rail, dividing employees into three compensation regions. Which region you land in determines what you are eligible for — and this table is the part almost nobody explains:

Two consequences follow that a GS employee would find alien. An employee assessed as overcompensated can have the annual across-the-board increase reduced or denied — something the General Schedule does not do. And an undercompensated high contributor can take up to a 20% permanent increase in a single cycle, which no GS step increase approaches.

CRI carryover at the band maximum

A band has a ceiling, so what happens when a well-earned increase would push basic pay past it? The money is not lost. Per the Army ASC guidance, when a resulting CRI exceeds a compensation maximum — the broadband maximum, a pay lane, or a control point — the pay pool panel authorises a CRI carryover, and the amount exceeding the compensation maximum is added to the contribution award instead.

So the excess converts from a permanent basic pay increase into a one-time lump sum. That is a materially worse outcome for the employee even though the headline dollar figure that year is the same: a contribution award does not raise your basic pay, which means it does not compound into future increases and does not count toward your high-three for retirement. Sitting near the top of a band changes the value of good performance, and it is a reason the NH-III to NH-IV move matters.

The PRD, and why you qualify at the bottom

AcqDemo does not use a position description. The equivalent document is a Position Requirements Document (PRD), and the GS-to-AcqDemo terminology crosswalk maps them directly — along with pay plan code becoming a pay plan designator (NH, NJ or NK) and grades and steps becoming broadband levels.

The practical consequence for an applicant is the one that catches people out. Because a band spans two or more GS grades, an announcement at NH-III covers work from GS-12 through GS-13. You must qualify for the bottom of the band — but where you are actually set within it depends on what your application evidences. A candidate who qualifies at GS-12 level and a candidate who evidences GS-13 level work are both eligible, and the gap between them in this band is $41,741.

That is a much larger consequence than the equivalent GS decision, where the grade is fixed by the announcement and only the step is negotiable. In AcqDemo the resume is arguing for a position inside a band that is $41,741 wide.

Converting in from GS

An employee converting from the General Schedule keeps their basic pay, and unearned progress toward the next step is not simply discarded. The Army ASC guidance describes a WGI buy-in: a prorated calculation based on the number of completed weeks toward the next step increase. A separate career ladder promotion buy-in works the same way for completed weeks toward the next higher grade.

Converting also resets what you are assessed on. AcqDemo contribution assessment can only consider work completed during time served under AcqDemo, so the first cycle after conversion is judged on a partial year.

One system to be careful not to confuse with this one: the Cyber Excepted Service is a separate DoD personnel system with its own pay bands, established under different authority. It is not AcqDemo, and its bands do not map to NH, NJ or NK.