GSA Per Diem Rates Explained: How CONUS Rates Are Set

Who is actually behind these numbers?

GSA stands for the General Services Administration, a federal agency better known for managing government buildings and buying office supplies at scale. Buried in its remit is something far more consequential for anyone who travels for work in the public sector: the legal authority to decide how much federal employees get reimbursed for a hotel room and a day's meals. That authority comes from a specific piece of law, 5 U.S.C. § 5702, which lets the GSA Administrator set the whole system for reimbursing subsistence expenses on official travel.

This isn't a rounding exercise done once and forgotten. GSA runs it as a standing programme, revisiting lodging rates every year and the meals-and-incidentals structure on its own cycle. The output feeds directly into agency travel policy across the federal government, and indirectly into a lot of private-sector expense policies that just borrow the GSA numbers because they're already vetted and public. If you want the plain breakdown of what the standard rate actually pays, see our guide to the standard CONUS per diem rate.

Two tiers: standard rate and non-standard areas

Every county in the continental United States falls into one of two buckets. Most — roughly 85% of them — get the standard CONUS rate, a flat lodging cap and meal allowance that applies by default when nowhere on GSA's published list names your destination specifically. For FY2026 that standard rate is $110 a night for lodging and $68 a day for meals and incidental expenses (M&IE).

The other bucket is non-standard areas, or NSAs: roughly 296 counties, cities, or military zones that get their own bespoke rate because enough federal staff travel there that a one-size number would be unfair in both directions. Think Washington DC, New York, San Francisco, or a naval base town where hotel prices run well above the national norm. GSA reviews every NSA annually and can add or drop locations as travel patterns and hotel markets shift. For a full explainer on what happens when nowhere on the list matches your trip, read our piece on CONUS per diem rates.

The hotel data behind the lodging cap

Here's the part most explainers skip: GSA doesn't invent these numbers internally. Since fiscal year 2005, lodging per diem rates have been built from average daily rate (ADR) data — a standard lodging-industry metric calculated as a hotel's room revenue divided by the number of rooms actually rented. GSA contracts with a data provider (industry reporting from firms such as STR is the source most often cited) to pull ADR figures for a trailing twelve-month window, typically April through March, across thousands of properties.

GSA doesn't take the raw average of every hotel in town. Properties are filtered first for fire-safety certification, since federal travellers can only be reimbursed for staying somewhere with a current FEMA fire-safe ID, then narrowed down to a set that best represents mid-range, mid-scale hotels rather than budget motels or luxury suites. The rate is then set at that ADR figure minus 5%, which builds in some headroom rather than pegging reimbursement to the exact market average. Where a destination has a genuine seasonal swing — a beach town in summer, a ski resort in winter — GSA layers in separate seasonal rates if pricing differs by at least 15% for a sustained two-month-plus stretch, so travellers booking in peak season aren't stuck with an off-season cap. Full detail on the process sits on GSA's own page on factors influencing lodging rates.

Meals and incidentals work on a slower clock. Rather than re-surveying restaurant pricing every year, GSA groups every location into one of five M&IE tiers and reassesses the tier structure roughly every three years — a cadence it moved to starting with FY2016 rates, according to GSA's per diem FAQ. Each tier splits into breakfast, lunch, dinner and an incidentals allowance, and the first and last calendar day of any trip is automatically paid at 75% of the full daily rate, since you're rarely travelling for a complete 24 hours on those days.

The FY2026 M&IE tiers

Notice how none of the individual meals sum exactly to the tier total minus incidentals — GSA rounds each component independently, which is why manually adding up a trip's meal allowance rarely matches the published daily figure to the penny. Our meals and incidentals calculator handles that arithmetic automatically, including the first-and-last-day reduction, and our M&IE breakdown guide walks through why the tiers are structured this way.

“Maintaining the FY 2026 per diem rates is a prudent step that reflects our commitment to responsible stewardship of taxpayer funds.”

— Larry Allen, Associate Administrator, GSA Office of Government-wide Policy — GSA press release, 15 August 2025

Why rates were frozen for FY2026

That quote isn't boilerplate — it explains a genuinely notable decision. GSA kept FY2026 rates identical to FY2025: $110 lodging, $68 standard M&IE, same NSA structure. That's unusual; rates typically drift up a little most years to track hotel inflation. Holding them flat signals that the ADR data GSA collected for the FY2026 cycle showed lodging costs roughly steady year-on-year, and that the agency chose not to pass through marginal increases. It's a useful reminder that these figures are recalculated from real market data every cycle, not adjusted by some fixed inflation formula.

The annual publishing cycle

The federal fiscal year runs 1 October to 30 September, and GSA times its rate release to match. NSA lodging rates for the coming fiscal year are typically finalised and published by mid-August, giving agencies and travellers about six weeks' notice before the new numbers go live on 1 October. The Federal Register notice for FY2026 is the formal record of that publication.

Rates aren't fully locked for the whole year, though. If a federal agency's travel management office can document that actual lodging costs in a given area have shifted meaningfully — a new stadium driving hotel demand, a disaster displacing housing stock — it can request a special review outside the normal cycle. Those mid-year changes are rare, but they're why it's worth checking the current rate rather than relying on a number you saw six months ago.

Where a tool like PerDiemWise fits in

All of this — the ADR surveys, the NSA list, the tier assignments, the seasonal splits — lands as a public dataset that GSA publishes for anyone to use. That's the raw material behind our per diem calculator: pick a city and a date, and it looks up whether that location has its own non-standard rate or falls back to the CONUS default, then applies the correct M&IE tier and first/last-day reduction automatically. You get the same figure a federal travel office would use, without hunting through GSA's location tables by hand. For the full picture of how we source and update that data, see our methodology page, and for a general primer on the whole system, our per diem hub is the starting point.