The Office of Personnel Management has finalized a rule ending the requirement that many General Schedule employees in the competitive service spend a year at one grade before they can be promoted to the next. The rule was released Friday, is scheduled to appear in Monday's Federal Register and takes effect Jan. 19, 2027.
Under the old regulation, a candidate generally could not be advanced to a covered position at GS-6 or above without first completing 52 weeks in a job no more than one grade lower, or two grades lower in occupations that climb in two-grade steps. The final text removes that restriction and adopts the agency's May proposal substantially as written.
OPM Director Scott Kupor has framed the change as a matter of merit. "To me, it's an anti-merit principle," he told Bloomberg Law in an interview the week before the rule came out, arguing that an employee hired three months earlier who is already performing at the next grade level should not be held back by "an arbitrary thing that slows us down from promoting you." When the proposal was unveiled in May, he said federal employees "should be rewarded for what they can do, not how long they have waited," according to Federal News Network.
The rule does not guarantee anyone a promotion. It makes employees eligible for consideration, but they still have to meet OPM's qualification standards, including specialized-experience requirements, along with any job-related requirements their agencies set, classification rules and the merit promotion procedures in Part 335 of OPM's regulations. Agencies are not required to act on promotion requests on demand, and the higher-level work and the money to pay for it still have to exist. Within-grade increases, veterans' preference, collective bargaining obligations and the statutory bans on prohibited personnel practices are unchanged, according to the rule. An agency that wants to keep a minimum period of service in grade may still require one, as long as the prerequisite is job-related, written into its merit promotion plan and applied consistently.
Public comment favored the change. OPM received 75 comments during a 60-day window that closed July 27, and 41 supported ending the wait. Several came from employees who said they had been chosen as the best-qualified candidate, or had been performing higher-graded work for extended periods, only to be ruled ineligible because 52 weeks had not passed. One commenter wrote that once personnel paperwork and hiring timelines are counted, the nominal year regularly stretches to 15 to 18 months or more.
Opponents defended the calendar rule as a safeguard. Commenters on that side told OPM the 52-week wait is a structural check on managers who might fast-track favored employees, with one calling it the strongest guardrail available, and another argued that the change would replace merit-based competitive examining with a spoils system. In a July letter, the Democracy Forward Foundation said the rule "removes a longstanding, objective constraint on rapid promotion (the 52-week period) without replacing it with meaningful standards for when accelerated advancement is appropriate." Skeptics have also called for guardrails such as skills testing and robust performance management, and some worry the change could let the administration carry out wide-scale layoffs and backfill the jobs with political allies, Bloomberg Law reported.
OPM declined to add the governmentwide standards, documentation rules, review boards or reporting mandates that some commenters sought for accelerated promotions. The rules for evaluating, ranking and selecting candidates sit in Part 335, the agency said, and changing them would call for a separate rulemaking aimed at that part. It also argued that the framework it now relies on, including published qualification standards, the prohibited personnel practice statutes, the Office of Special Counsel and the Merit Systems Protection Board, did not exist when the waiting period was first put in place.
The agency has tried this before. OPM issued a final rule eliminating the restriction in 2008 but withdrew it a year later, promising a broader review of pay, performance and staffing that was never finalized, Federal News Network reported in May. The wait has applied to General Schedule employees in competitive service positions since the 1950s, when it was meant to keep the workforce from becoming top-heavy. In its proposal, OPM argued that modern qualification standards had made the Korean War-era requirement outdated. Federal Wage Grade employees are not subject to it.
The rule fits a broader administration push toward skills-based hiring and away from tenure as the yardstick for federal careers. In March, OPM proposed giving performance priority over length of service in the retention registers agencies use when they carry out a reduction in force.