BAH Calculator 2026 — Basic Allowance for Housing Rates by ZIP and Pay Grade

What is BAH?

Ask what is BAH and the short answer is: it is the military’s housing money. BAH stands for Basic Allowance for Housing — a monthly cash allowance the U.S. Department of Defense pays to service members who are not housed by the government, so they can rent or buy a home in the civilian market near their duty station. It is not a reimbursement: nobody checks your lease, and if you find a home for less than your rate, you keep the difference. If you choose a home that costs more, the extra comes out of your base pay.

The BAH meaning military members in every service read on their Leave and Earnings Statement (LES) is identical — it is simply the housing line of your pay, separate from base pay and from the food allowance (BAS) — because the allowance comes from one law (37 U.S.C. § 403) and one set of tables published by the Defense Travel Management Office (DTMO). There is no separate Army table, Navy table or Air Force table: an Army BAH calculator and a Navy BAH calculator read the same numbers, because an E-6 in San Diego draws the same rate whichever uniform they wear. Branch searches — army bah, bah army, navy bah — all land on this single joint table.

Who actually receives it? In general, a member who is not assigned to government quarters: members with dependents who live off base or in privatized base housing, and single members once their service allows them to move out of the barracks or dormitory. Two situations change the picture, and both are covered in depth below:

• Government quarters provided. If you live in government-owned housing, the allowance is generally paid straight to the housing provider (in privatized housing) or not paid at all (in barracks). A member without dependents who is assigned to single-type quarters may instead receive the small partial BAH described in the edge-cases section.
• Dependents change the rate class, not the formula. The table holds exactly two rates per grade and area. Everything else — your actual rent, your years of service, your branch — is ignored by the calculation.

One more property matters for every money decision that follows: BAH is tax-free. It is excluded from federal income tax as a qualified military benefit, so the rate you see in the table is the amount that reaches your pay. That is also why lenders treat a dollar of BAH as worth more than a dollar of base pay — and why the same allowance quietly powers a second program entirely: the GI Bill’s housing allowance for students, which is built directly on one specific BAH rate. Both threads are picked up below.

Keep exploring

Three companion tools for military pay and housing.

How it works

Three steps from a ZIP code to your official rate.

How the 2026 BAH rates are set

How to look up your rate

A BAH lookup takes exactly three inputs, because the table has exactly three dimensions. The 2026 BAH calculator at the top of this page walks them in order:

1. Your duty-station ZIP code. This is the step people get wrong. BAH follows the installation you are assigned to, not the ZIP you sleep in. If you live across the river in a cheaper town and commute, your rate is still the duty station’s. Enter the installation’s ZIP and the tool resolves it to its Military Housing Area; if you do not know the ZIP, pick the housing area by name from the list — every area in the official 2026 table is there.
2. Your pay grade. E-1 to E-9, W-1 to W-5, O-1 to O-10 (with the O-1E/O-2E/O-3E prior-enlisted officer grades in between). Pick the grade on your orders, not the one you are about to pin on.
3. Your dependency status. With dependents or without — one tap. The tool then shows both rates anyway, so you can see exactly what the dependency step is worth in your area.

That is the whole method, and it is why there is no single printable BAH chart: a chart of all 299 areas × 27 grades × 2 dependency classes would run to some sixteen thousand cells, most of them irrelevant to any one reader. A BAH rate lookup — ZIP, grade, dependency — collapses it to the one cell that is yours. Two lookup situations deserve a warning:

• “No rate” ZIPs. A handful of ZIP codes, including some in Puerto Rico, Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands, map to a DTMO placeholder area that carries no locality rate in the 2026 table. If the tool says so, choose your housing area by name instead — and know that members in those territories are handled under different DTMO rules.
• Last year’s numbers. If you are comparing against the BAH calculator 2025 table, remember that those rates expired on December 31, 2025. A member already receiving BAH keeps the higher of the old and new amounts under rate protection (explained below), but a new arrival is paid from the 2026 table, full stop.

Finally, a mid-year surprise to be aware of: in an exceptional case DTMO can adjust an area inside the year — for 2026, the Abilene / Dyess AFB area (TX270) received a temporary increase in response to local market changes. It is rare, it is announced by DTMO when it happens, and it only ever moves a rate up for the members already there. For everyone else, the January table is the rate for the year.

The grade ladder and the dependency split

Open any housing area in the table and you see the same skeleton: 27 pay grades in three families — enlisted (E-1 to E-9), warrant officers (W-1 to W-5) and commissioned officers (O-1 to O-10, with the prior-enlisted O-1E, O-2E and O-3E rungs paid slightly above their O-1 to O-3 counterparts). Rates step upward with grade because each grade is anchored to a larger or better housing profile in DTMO’s survey: junior enlisted grades anchor to a one-bedroom apartment, mid-grade enlisted and junior officers to two-bedroom units, senior grades to three- and four-bedroom houses. Two features of the ladder surprise people:

• The bottom rungs are flat. In San Diego in 2026, E-1 through E-4 all draw the same rate — the anchor profile is identical for the four junior grades, so the ladder only starts climbing at E-5.
• The top rungs merge. O-7 through O-10 share one rate in most areas: above a certain housing standard, the table stops differentiating.

Here is one complete ladder, taken from the official 2026 table — San Diego, CA (CA038), monthly rates:

Source: DTMO “All BAH Rates” 2026 for Military Housing Area CA038 (San Diego, CA), effective January 1, 2026. Every area has the same ladder shape with its own numbers — run the calculator above for yours.

Now the second dimension. BAH with dependents is the higher of the two rates for every grade, and DTMO is explicit about what “dependents” does and does not mean: the allowance distinguishes between with-dependents and without-dependents — not the number of dependents. A spouse counts. One child counts. Five children count exactly the same as one: the rate steps up once, when the first dependent arrives, and never again. So does BAH increase with dependents? Yes — once, by the dependency step in the table — and the size of that step is a local number, not a fixed allowance. In San Diego it is worth $828 a month at E-5 but only $270 at O-3, because the without-dependents anchor for officers already sits close to the family profile. In New York City the E-5 step is just $90, while in San Francisco it is $1,041. This is exactly what the BAH with dependents calculator view above is for: it shows both of your rates and the step between them, for your grade, in your area, before you sign anything.

Who counts as a dependent is a personnel question, answered in DEERS: generally a spouse and children, and in defined cases a dependent parent or ward. The rate follows the registration — if a dependent is not in DEERS, finance cannot pay the with-dependents rate on them, which is why a marriage or a birth should be followed by a DEERS update before the next pay cycle, not after it.

The 2026 BAH increase

Every December the Department of Defense publishes the new table, and every January 1 it takes effect. The BAH increase 2026 was announced on December 11, 2025: rates rose by an average of 4.2% across the country, covering roughly 1 million service members and an estimated $29.9 billion in payments for the year (U.S. Department of Defense, December 2025). For scale, the recent run of average increases was 12.1% in 2023 — the spike that followed the post-pandemic rent surge — then 5.4% in both 2024 and 2025, before settling to this year’s 4.2%.

Read the average the way DTMO intends it: as a national mean of 299 separate local decisions, not as a promise about your line on the LES. The 2026 military BAH rates rose sharply in some tight rental markets, barely moved in others, and in a minority of areas the newly published rate is lower than last year’s. Three rules decide what an individual member actually sees when a new table lands:

• If your area’s rate went up, you get the increase — automatically, from January 1, whatever your arrival date.
• If your area’s rate went down, rate protection holds your amount. You keep receiving the higher of the new published rate or what you were paid on December 31, for as long as your grade, dependency status and duty station stay the same.
• A change of status re-prices you. A PCS move, a reduction in grade or a change in dependency status ends the protection and puts you on the current table for the new situation. A promotion does not cut your BAH either — it moves you to your new grade’s rate, protection and all.

Is a BAH increase guaranteed every year? No. The statute requires the annual survey, not an annual rise: the table follows measured rents, and where rents fall, published rates can fall too — protection exists precisely because that happens. What is guaranteed is the mechanism: new data every year, a December publication, a January effective date, and no mid-year cuts for members already in place. The rates on this page are the official DTMO 2026 table, verified October 2026; this section is refreshed each year when the new table is released.

BAH and the GI Bill

The single most valuable BAH rate in the table belongs to people who may never wear a uniform again. Under the Post-9/11 GI Bill (Chapter 33), the VA pays students a Monthly Housing Allowance (MHA) — and the MHA is not a VA invention. It is set equal to one specific cell of the BAH table: the E-5 with-dependents rate for the ZIP code of the school (more precisely, of the campus where the student physically attends most classes). That is why searches for a GI Bill BAH calculator and for this page’s calculator keep colliding: both read the same number, and then the VA applies its own set of adjustments on top:

• Rate of pursuit. You must be enrolled more than half time to receive any MHA. Above that line, VA prorates by your course load rounded to the nearest tenth — 9 credits where 12 is full time pays at 80%.
• Eligibility tier. Your percentage of the benefit (50% to 100%, set by your length of active-duty service) multiplies the result again.
• Online study pays differently. A student taking only online classes is paid on half the national average rate instead — capped at $1,198 a month for the 2026–27 academic year — no matter how expensive their home ZIP code is. One in-person class restores the campus rate.
• The calendar differs. BAH resets every January 1, but student rates reset every August 1: the MHA paid from August 1, 2026 through July 31, 2027 is built on the 2026 BAH table — the rates on this page.

Put numbers on it with this page’s default area. A San Diego campus carries an E-5 with-dependents rate of $3,975, so a full-time student at the 100% tier draws $3,975 a month in MHA; at an 80% rate of pursuit, $3,180; at the 60% eligibility tier and a full load, $2,385; and the same student studying purely online is capped at $1,198 — $2,777 a month less than the classroom across town. VA pays MHA at the end of each month of enrolment, and pays nothing for breaks between terms, to students still on active duty, or at half time or below. The full student-side walkthrough — tuition caps, the book stipend, payment timing — is in our GI Bill housing allowance guide, linked from the guides strip below; any general GI Bill calculator that asks for a school ZIP is pricing this same E-5 rate underneath.

Partial BAH, dual military and edge cases

Most members draw a locality rate and never meet the rest of the system. But the BAH military members actually receive comes in several other forms, all published by DTMO as non-locality rates — amounts that depend on grade alone, not on any ZIP code. Three of them matter in practice (DoD Financial Management Regulation, Volume 7A, Chapter 26):

Source: DTMO 2026 non-locality BAH rates, effective January 1, 2026. The full table covers all 27 grades; these rows span the ladder.

• Partial BAH is the small monthly amount — $6.90 at E-1 up to $50.70 for O-7 and above — paid to a member without dependents who is assigned to single-type government quarters. It exists so that a barracks resident is not the one member with no housing allowance at all; the amounts are fixed by law and do not change with the annual survey.
• BAH RC/T (Reserve Component / Transit) covers reservists called to active duty for 30 days or fewer, and members in transit between stations from an area where no prior BAH rate exists. Because it is not tied to a place, it is set from national-average housing costs and stepped up each year by the average change in those costs.
• BAH-Diff (BAH Differential) is for a member in single-type quarters who is authorized BAH solely because they pay child support. The condition is mechanical: if the monthly child support is less than the BAH-Diff amount for the grade, no BAH-Diff is payable. (A member paying child support who lives on the local economy instead receives the with-dependents locality rate.)

Dual military couples — two service members married to each other — follow the FMR’s cleanest rule: each member receives their own BAH; the couple is not reduced to one allowance. What they cannot do is both claim the same dependents. With no dependents, both draw their own without-dependents rate (each at their own duty station, if assigned apart). With children, exactly one member draws the with-dependents rate and the other draws the without-dependents rate: the couple chooses which of them claims the children — and if they cannot agree, the regulation gives the with-dependents rate to the senior member. The choice can be transferred later, but only from the date of the new election, never retroactively. Worked on San Diego’s 2026 table: two E-6s with children draw $4,404 + $3,387 = $7,791 a month between them; the same couple without children draws $3,387 + $3,387 = $6,774.

Two neighbours of BAH complete the map, and both are deliberately not in this calculator. OHA, the Overseas Housing Allowance, replaces BAH outside the United States: instead of a flat local rate it reimburses actual rent up to a ceiling, with separate utility and move-in components — a different DTMO system with its own lookup. And members assigned to government family housing do not lose the allowance so much as redirect it: in privatized housing the BAH is paid to the housing provider as the rent. If your situation touches any of these edges — a custody change, an unaccompanied tour, a member-to-member marriage — the numbers above frame the question, but your finance office’s reading of the FMR is the answer that pays.

Go deeper

Two things every BAH recipient should know.

VR&E, partial BAH, and the OHA boundary

Three things that are not the BAH rate in the table — and where each one is actually decided.

Three questions arrive at this page that the BAH table itself cannot answer, and each has its own answer, in its own place. The first is VR&E: Vocational Rehabilitation and Employment, under Chapter 31, pays a subsistence allowance to veterans in approved rehabilitation training, and that allowance is sometimes described as BAH-like because both payments relate to living costs. It is not BAH. BAH is a Department of Defense allowance for service members, from the DTMO tables, by duty station, grade and dependents. The VR&E subsistence allowance is a VA payment, by training type, attendance and dependents, under VA rates. The distinction, the eligibility, and the place to find the current figures are set out in the guide linked below — and no BAH figure should ever be used to estimate a VR&E payment, because the two are different programmes with different amounts.

The second is partial BAH: the small monthly amount paid to a member without dependents who is assigned to single-type government quarters, such as barracks or dormitories, instead of the full locality rate. Partial BAH is a non-locality rate — it depends on grade alone, not on any ZIP code — and it is published by DTMO with the other non-locality rates, alongside BAH RC/T and BAH Differential. A member in government quarters who is not receiving the full rate should check whether partial BAH or BAH Differential applies to their situation, and the answer is in the DTMO non-locality tables and the member’s finance office, not in the locality table this calculator reads.

The third is the overseas boundary. Overseas housing is covered by OHA — the Overseas Housing Allowance — which reimburses actual rent up to a ceiling, with separate utility and move-in components, under a different DTMO system with its own lookup. Members in privatised family housing do not lose the allowance so much as redirect it: the BAH is paid to the housing provider as the rent. The official BAH lookup at travel.dod.mil prevails for every rate on this page, and the DTMO tables are refreshed each January — the January table is the rate for the year, subject only to the rare mid-year adjustment DTMO announces for a specific area.

Related guides

Six guides that go deeper — the student rate, the grade ladder, the big locations, the neighbouring allowances, the tax rule, and VR&E housing.

Related calculators

More tools for pay, take-home and housing costs.