JBLM BAH 2026: Housing Allowance Rates by Pay Grade

Updated 4 September 2026. Rates are the Department of Defense published figures for WA311 effective 1 January 2026, cross-checked against four independent rate tables with no disagreement. 2027 rates publish in mid-December 2026 — if you report in January or later, pull your own from the calculator linked below.

2026 BAH rates at JBLM, every pay grade

Monthly, effective 1 January 2026, for Military Housing Area WA311. The number of dependents makes no difference — the columns are simply with and without. Department of Defense rate tables print the warrant grades as W-1 through W-5.

Pay grade	With dependents	Without dependents	The gap	With dependents, per year
E-1	$2,370	$2,034	$336	$28,440
E-2	$2,370	$2,034	$336	$28,440
E-3	$2,370	$2,034	$336	$28,440
E-4	$2,370	$2,034	$336	$28,440
E-5	$2,556	$2,121	$435	$30,672
E-6	$2,919	$2,199	$720	$35,028
E-7	$2,994	$2,376	$618	$35,928
E-8	$3,072	$2,634	$438	$36,864
E-9	$3,180	$2,736	$444	$38,160
WO-1	$2,940	$2,313	$627	$35,280
WO-2	$3,024	$2,631	$393	$36,288
WO-3	$3,126	$2,751	$375	$37,512
WO-4	$3,201	$2,931	$270	$38,412
WO-5	$3,297	$3,009	$288	$39,564
O-1E	$3,006	$2,553	$453	$36,072
O-2E	$3,108	$2,712	$396	$37,296
O-3E	$3,216	$2,913	$303	$38,592
O-1	$2,607	$2,178	$429	$31,284
O-2	$2,916	$2,496	$420	$34,992
O-3	$3,123	$2,784	$339	$37,476
O-4	$3,324	$2,991	$333	$39,888
O-5	$3,471	$3,030	$441	$41,652
O-6	$3,501	$3,102	$399	$42,012
O-7 and above	$3,525	$3,156	$369	$42,300

The gap column is worth a look before a wedding or a divorce. It is widest at E-6, where having dependents is worth $720 a month, and narrowest at WO-4, where it is $270.

Look up a single grade

These are the published figures, not an estimate. The rent and utility split comes from the Department of Defense component breakdown for WA311 and is an area average — yours will differ.

Which housing area is JBLM in?

WA311, named Tacoma, WA. That code is what the Department of Defense uses to set the rate, and it is the answer to a question surprisingly few sites bother to print.

All four JBLM ZIP codes fall inside it, so an Airman at McChord Field and a Soldier on Lewis Main of the same grade and dependency status draw exactly the same allowance:

ZIP	What it is
98433	Lewis Main. This is the ZIP Military OneSource tells you to use for the lookup, though any of the four returns the same rate.
98438	McChord Field
98431	Madigan Army Medical Center
98439	The Lakewood and Tillicum side of the base

Where you can live and keep the same rate

WA311 covers 100 ZIP codes. Everywhere in this list pays the identical JBLM allowance: Tacoma, Lakewood, DuPont, Steilacoom, Spanaway, Graham, Puyallup, Sumner, Bonney Lake, Orting, Eatonville, Roy, Gig Harbor, Lacey, Olympia, Tumwater and Yelm. There is no BAH advantage to choosing one over another. Choose on commute, schools and rent instead.

Just outside it, and worth knowing if you are comparing listings: Federal Way, Auburn and Kent are in WA309, Seattle. Port Orchard, Bremerton and Silverdale are WA306. Centralia and Chehalis are outside the surveyed housing areas altogether. Living in any of them does not change a JBLM member's rate — the rate follows the duty station — but a rate you read on a Federal Way page is a different area's number.

What changed from 2025

The national average BAH increase for 2026 was 4.2 percent. JBLM did not get that. With-dependents rates in WA311 rose about 2 percent across the board, because Tacoma-area rents cooled while the national picture did not.

Grade, with dependents	2025	2026	Change
E-1 to E-4	$2,328	$2,370	+$42 a month, 1.8%
E-5	$2,508	$2,556	+$48 a month, 1.9%
E-6	$2,850	$2,919	+$69 a month, 2.4%
E-7	$2,922	$2,994	+$72 a month, 2.5%
E-9	$3,105	$3,180	+$75 a month, 2.4%
O-3	$3,051	$3,123	+$72 a month, 2.4%
O-5	$3,387	$3,471	+$84 a month, 2.5%

Without-dependents rates moved differently, and by grade rather than uniformly. The Department of Defense explanation is that each pay grade is tied to a particular housing type — apartments for junior members, townhomes and detached houses higher up — so rates follow the price of that specific segment, and segments can move in opposite directions in the same city. To see your own change, run the calculator below twice, once with the year set to 2025 and once to 2026.

What the number is built from

• Rent is 87 percent of the rate, utilities 13 percent, per the official component breakdown for WA311. So an E-5 with dependents at $2,556 is being paid as though rent were about $2,224 and power, heat and water about $332. When you compare the allowance to a listing price, the rent component is the honest number to use.
• You absorb 5 percent. The 2026 rates carry a deliberate member cost share, so BAH covers about 95 percent of the calculated local housing cost rather than all of it. Nationally that share runs $93 to $212 a month depending on grade. It has not been eliminated.
• Rates come from a survey of 299 housing areas, refreshed every year from local median rents and average utilities.

The rules that catch people out

Your rate cannot fall while you stay put

Individual rate protection means you receive either the newly published January rate or what you were getting on 31 December, whichever is larger. Three things break it: a permanent change of station to a cheaper area, a reduction in grade, or a change in dependency status. Losing it one year does not stop it protecting you the next.

A second child does not raise it

The allowance distinguishes only between with and without dependents. It does not scale with family size. A married E-5 with one child and a married E-5 with four both draw $2,556. The higher rate does start the day you acquire the dependent, though, not the following month — the marriage date or the birth date.

Both of you serve? Only one draws the dependent rate

If a dual-military couple has no children, each member draws the without-dependents rate — two E-5s at JBLM take $2,121 each, $4,242 between them. Once there is a dependent, only one of you can draw the with-dependents rate. You choose which; if you cannot agree, it goes to the senior member, and you can transfer it later but never retroactively.

Choose deliberately, because the grades are not symmetrical. An E-6 and an E-5 with a child, both at JBLM and both living off post, take $5,040 a month if the E-6 claims the dependent, and $4,755 if the E-5 does. That is $285 a month, $3,420 a year, decided by a form. The gap comes from E-6 having the widest dependent spread in this housing area, so run your own two grades through the table above rather than assuming.

On the move here, the money changes on the day you sign in

Your losing station's rate runs through the day before you report. WA311's rate starts on your reporting day at the Installation Reception Center or your unit. There is no gap and no overlap. Coming from a cheaper area your pay rises that day; coming from Seattle or San Diego it falls. Members arriving from overseas draw a flat transit rate rather than a locality rate until they report.

It is not taxed

Housing allowance is excluded from gross income. It is not subject to federal income tax, and it does not appear in Box 1 of your W-2. Washington has no state income tax either way. That is why comparing the allowance to a civilian salary understates it — the allowance is what lands, not what is left after withholding.

Promotion, and the Reserve

Every promotion step raises the allowance at JBLM in 2026, and the biggest single jump is E-5 to E-6 with dependents, worth $363 a month. E-6 to E-7 is worth only $75. Reservists on orders of 31 days or more draw the same WA311 rate as active duty; shorter orders pay a flat rate that is roughly half.

What the allowance actually rents near JBLM

The table below compares the with-dependents allowance against local median asking rents for a three-bedroom, gathered on 4 September 2026. Rents move; treat this as the shape of the market rather than a quote.

Town	Median 3-bedroom	E-5 with dependents, $2,556	E-6 with dependents, $2,919
Olympia	$2,400	covers it, $156 over	covers it, $519 over
DuPont	$2,547	covers it, $9 over	covers it, $372 over
Spanaway	$2,550	covers it, $6 over	covers it, $369 over
Lakewood	$2,595	$39 short	covers it, $324 over
Tacoma	$2,597	$41 short	covers it, $322 over
Lacey	$2,600	$44 short	covers it, $319 over
Puyallup	$2,695	$139 short	covers it, $224 over
Steilacoom	$2,697	$141 short	covers it, $222 over

Read that as: an E-6 with dependents clears the median three-bedroom everywhere in the area. An E-5 with dependents is close everywhere and only comfortably ahead in Olympia, DuPont and Spanaway. Four bedrooms are out of reach on the allowance alone below about E-7 — the cheapest local four-bedroom median is around $2,950. Remember too that roughly 13 percent of the allowance is meant for utilities, so clearing the rent by $50 is not clearing it.

One local assumption worth correcting. The usual advice is that DuPont and Steilacoom are the premium choices and Puyallup and Spanaway are where the money stretches. The rent data only half agrees: Spanaway's three-bedroom median genuinely is among the cheapest, but Puyallup's is among the most expensive, and DuPont sits mid-pack for houses while having the priciest apartments. Olympia and Lacey carry the lowest three-bedroom rents in the housing area, and they are the furthest from the gate — the state's own figures put the Olympia to Tacoma morning commute at 34 minutes on average and 49 minutes when you need to be certain.

On post, the allowance goes to Liberty Military Housing as rent, and that rent covers gas, water and average electricity use. Compare it to an off-post house by adding what you would actually pay for utilities to the listing price. The housing office at 253-967-3581 keeps the local landlord list and reviews leases before you sign; see the JBLM guide for the offices and the waitlist.

Look up your own rate

The official tool is the Defense Travel Management Office BAH Rate Lookup. It asks three things:

• ZIP code — enter your duty station's, not your home's. For JBLM that is 98433.
• Year — 2026 for current rates. Selecting 2025 and then 2026 is how you check your own year-over-year change.
• Pay grade — E-1 through E-9, W-1 through W-5, the prior-enlisted officer grades, and O-1 upward.

The same page carries three supplemental documents almost nobody reads and which answer most follow-up questions: the component breakdown showing the rent and utility split for every housing area, the national out-of-pocket amounts, and the non-locality rates covering partial BAH, the differential and the reserve rate.

2027 rates publish in mid-December 2026 and take effect on 1 January. If you report to JBLM in January 2027 or later, the figures on this page are last year's. Rate protection does not help you there — it only applies once you are already drawing the allowance at a location, so an inbound member gets whatever the new table says.

Frequently asked questions

Acronyms on this page

The short version of each term used above. Every one links to its full entry in the military moving acronyms dictionary, which defines 74 terms from PCS to VA home loan.

Term	What it means
BAH	Basic Allowance for Housing, the monthly payment toward rent and utilities when you are not in government quarters.
MHA	Military Housing Area, the rate zone. JBLM is WA311, Tacoma.
PCS	Permanent Change of Station, the official move to your next duty station.
PDS	Permanent Duty Station, the installation you are assigned to. It sets your BAH.
BAH-DIFF	The differential paid to a member in single quarters who is authorized a housing allowance solely because they pay child support.
Partial BAH	The small frozen rate paid to an unaccompanied member living in government single quarters.
BAH RC/T	The flat reserve component and transit rate, paid for orders under 31 days and to members in transit from overseas.
OHA	Overseas Housing Allowance, the equivalent outside the United States.
BAS	Basic Allowance for Subsistence, the food allowance. Also untaxed, and separate from BAH.
LES	Leave and Earnings Statement, where the allowance appears as its own line.
DTMO	Defense Travel Management Office, which publishes the rates and the lookup tool.
JTR	Joint Travel Regulations. Housing allowance rules sit in the Financial Management Regulation, Volume 7A, Chapter 26.

Sources and data notes

• The rates: the Department of Defense published 2026 BAH rate files for MHA WA311, released 11 December 2025 and effective 1 January 2026, obtained from the Defense Travel Management Office rate library. Every figure was checked against four independent published tables with no disagreement on any grade.
• The housing area and its ZIP codes: the Department of Defense housing-area name and ZIP mapping files for 2026, in the same rate package.
• The 2025 comparison: the Department of Defense 2025 BAH rate tables, so both years come from official data rather than a secondary source.
• The rent and utility split, and the 5 percent member share: the 2026 BAH Rate Component Breakdown, published by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness.
• National increase and out-of-pocket range: Air and Space Forces Magazine and Military.com, both 2026.
• The rules: the Department of Defense Financial Management Regulation, Volume 7A, Chapter 26, "Housing Allowances", dated May 2025, at comptroller.war.gov, plus the Defense Travel Management Office housing-allowance FAQs.
• Taxability: Military OneSource and IRS Publication 3, Armed Forces' Tax Guide.
• Local rents: median asking rents by bedroom count, retrieved 4 September 2026. Asking rents are what landlords list, not what tenants pay, and small towns carry small samples.
• On-post housing: the Liberty Military Housing resident FAQ, which states that rent is based on the housing allowance and covers gas, water and average electricity use.
• Partial BAH, differential and reserve figures on this page are the most recent published values and are labelled where they predate 2026. Rates change every January and can change mid-year in a declared disaster area. Confirm the rate in effect on your report date with the calculator, or with the Housing Services Office at 253-967-3581.