Active duty service members got a 3.8% pay raise for 2026, effective January 1 — a meaningfully larger increase than the 1% that landed on the civilian federal workforce's base pay the same year. * The raise applies uniformly across every pay grade, from E-1 at the bottom of the enlisted ranks all the way up to O-10, the four-star general or admiral level, and across every years-of-service bracket within those grades. There's no locality-pay-style carve-out the way there is for civilian federal employees — a 3.8% raise means 3.8% more at every rank. * The number itself isn't arbitrary. By law, the annual military pay raise is tied to the Employment Cost Index, a Bureau of Labor Statistics measure of how much private-sector wages and salaries grew. Specifically, the 2026 raise reflects ECI growth between the third quarter of 2023 and the third quarter of 2024, which is why the military raise and other cost-of-living-linked figures don't always move in lockstep with each other in the same year. * The increase was formally authorized through the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2026, which President Trump signed into law on December 18, 2025 — Congress and the administration typically finalize the following year's raise in the NDAA passed in the preceding December.