The surface velocity and the bulk lifetime of photo-excited free carriers in GaAs were measured using an optical-pump and THz-probe time-domain technique. By varying the pump laser photon energy from 1.56 to 4.15 eV, we observe that the surface velocity drops abruptly from 0.7×106 cm/s down to 0.2×106 cm/s at 2.5 eV, while the bulk lifetime remains almost constant. We tentatively explain this step-like behavior of the surface velocity vs the photon energy by a trapping of the free carriers at surface states, whose density of states shows a maximum at 2.5 eV.