Grade pay died on 1 January 2016, but it refuses to leave the paperwork: service books, old seniority lists, MACP records and half the pay queries in every office still speak it. This article is the complete succession table — every grade pay of the 6th CPC mapped to the pay level that replaced it and the entry basic that level carries — with the two mappings people ask for most worked as full salary calculations.

The complete mapping

The mapping is one-to-one and it is total: every post that carried a grade pay on 31 December 2015 woke up on 1 January 2016 in exactly one level, and its pay was fixed in that level’s column by the 2.57 rule. Nothing about the mapping is discretionary — a drawing and disbursing officer does not choose your level; the table above is the whole decision. If your records show a grade pay, your level is on the same row, and your cell is whichever cell of that column equals your current basic pay.

The one ambiguity: two 5400s

Grade pay 5400 appears twice because it sat in two pay bands. In PB-2 it succeeded to Level 9 (entry ₹53,100); in PB-3 — the Group A entry — it succeeded to Level 10 (entry ₹56,100). The grade pay alone does not tell you the level; the pay band does. This single fork explains most “my colleague and I had the same grade pay but different levels” puzzles from the 2016 fixation, and it is why the 7th CPC Salary Calculator asks for your level, not your old grade pay.

Worked as a calculator, one: grade pay 4200

Run the 4200 grade pay salary calculator path by hand. Step one, map: grade pay 4200 → Level 6. Step two, read the entry cell: ₹35,400. Step three, run the standard payslip at today’s rates (DA 60%, X-class city, higher-TPTA transport): basic ₹35,400, DA ₹21,240, HRA ₹10,620, transport ₹5,760 — gross ₹73,020; less NPS ₹5,664, CGHS ₹450 and CGEGIS ₹60 — estimated in-hand ₹66,846 a month, before income tax. That is the whole “calculator”: a mapping, a cell, and the standard lines. A serving employee a few increments into Level 6 substitutes their own cell for the entry cell and every line re-runs.

Worked as a calculator, two: grade pay 4600

The 4600 grade pay salary calculator path is the same three steps one row down the table: grade pay 4600 → Level 7 → entry basic ₹44,900. At the same rates: DA ₹26,940, HRA ₹13,470, transport ₹5,760, gross ₹91,070; less NPS ₹7,184, CGHS ₹650, CGEGIS ₹60 — estimated in-hand ₹83,176. Level 7 is the Section Officer grade, which is why this is the most-run mapping of the fifteen: it converts the largest single block of old grade-pay records into a current payslip.

The state reading — Uttar Pradesh and the rest

The mapping above is the Centre’s. The much-searched 4600 grade pay salary in up question is about a Uttar Pradesh state employee, and the honest answer has two halves. Uttar Pradesh, like most states, took the 7th CPC pattern into its own pay structure through its own pay committee and state orders, so the architecture — grade pay succeeded by levels on the same ladder — will look familiar, and the central mapping is the right first reference. But the governing table for a UP state payslip is the state’s own: fitment dates, the state’s DA orders (states issue their own, usually following the Centre’s with a lag) and any state-specific change all sit in state notifications, not in the CCS (Revised Pay) Rules. Read the level off this table; read the money off the state order.

One large service needs no such caveat: the Railways. Railway employees are central government employees on this same matrix and this same succession table — a railway record quoting grade pay 4600 converts to Level 7 by the row above, without translation. What differs for railway staff is the allowance set around the cell (running and mileage-linked allowances are theirs alone), never the level the grade pay maps to.

How the mapping was actually applied in 2016

The succession table decided which column; the 2.57 rule decided which cell. One full run at the bottom of the ladder: a PB-1 employee with grade pay 2400 drawing pay in the band of ₹9,300 had a 6th CPC pay of ₹9,300 + ₹2,400 = ₹11,700. The mapping sent grade pay 2400 to Level 4. The product, ₹11,700 x 2.57 = ₹30,069, fell between Level 4 cells ₹29,600 and ₹30,500 — so the pay was fixed at ₹30,500, cell 7 of Level 4, and the employee’s subsequent increments walked down that column from there. Every fixation statement issued in 2016 is those two lookups — this table for the column, the upward rounding for the cell — repeated some 47 lakh times.

At the top of the ladder the same mechanics produced the famous edge case the calculator page retells: at the PB-4 minimum (grade pay 8700, pay in band ₹37,400), the product ₹46,100 x 2.57 = ₹1,18,477 fell below Level 13’s entry cell of ₹1,23,100, because rationalisation had set that level’s start above the bare product. Those employees were fixed on the entry cell itself — the mapping, not the multiplication, had the last word. It is the one place in the whole conversion where the succession table beat the formula, and it is why this table, rather than the factor alone, is the document that decides a level.

Reading old records without tripping

Three habits keep legacy records straight. First, a pre-2016 record always names a pay band with its grade pay — “PB-2 + 4600” is a complete address, and the table converts it whole; a grade pay quoted without its band is complete too, except for the single 5400 fork. Second, MACP and ACP records from before 2016 speak of upgradation to the next grade pay — translate the destination through this table before comparing it with a post-2016 record that names the next level; the two phrases describe the same rung in different vocabularies. Third, where a state or a railway or defence record uses the same grade-pay numbers, the succession logic is the same pattern, but the governing table is that service’s own adoption — the central table in this article is the reference, not the authority, outside the CCS (Revised Pay) Rules.

What the mapping does not decide

The table fixes your column and nothing else, and three common confusions live in the gap. It does not fix your cell: two Level 7 employees can sit twenty cells apart, and the mapping has nothing to say about it — your cell is your increments, counted from wherever the 2016 fixation (or your recruitment) placed you. It does not fix your allowances by itself, though it feeds them: the transport band, the CGHS subscription band and the CGEGIS band are all read off the level, which is the mapping’s quiet second job. And it does not make the two 5400 successors interchangeable in money: at their entry cells today, Level 9 pays an estimated ₹1,03,204 in hand against Level 10’s ₹1,08,364 on this article’s assumptions — a ₹5,160 monthly difference that flows entirely from the fork. If a record of yours was converted through the wrong fork in 2016, every subsequent line — increments, DA, pension — inherits the error, which is why the fork, alone among the fifteen rows, is worth checking against the original pay band entry in the service book.

What replaced the “next grade pay” idea

Under the 6th CPC, a promotion meant the next grade pay, and careers were described in grade-pay steps. The matrix kept the ladder and changed the rungs: a promotion is now fixation in the next level — one increment in your present level, then placement at the first cell of the higher level that is equal to or above the incremented figure. The fixation article works that rule end to end, including its MACP twin. What the mapping gives you is the address system both rules run on: grade pay is the old street name; the level is the current one, and this table is the conversion posted on the corner.

Method and sources: grade pay to level succession as notified in the CCS (Revised Pay) Rules, 2016 (First Schedule) against the 6th CPC pay band and grade pay structure; entry cells from the official pay matrix; worked payslips computed on the calculator page’s standard lines at DA 60% (Department of Expenditure OM dated 22 April 2026, re-verified 23 October 2026) and cross-checked against the live calculator engine.