Federal Retirement Checklist 5 Years Out: What to Verify Before You File

Why Five Years Matters

Five years is the minimum window for catching errors that can permanently reduce your FERS annuity. Military buyback deposits require months of paperwork. Missing SF-50s take multiple HR cycles to reconstruct. And the five-year continuous enrollment rule for FEHB and FEGLI is measured backward from your separation date — if you dropped coverage six years ago, you still have time to fix it. If you dropped it four years ago, you don't.

Most federal employees first look at their retirement numbers around 12 to 18 months out. By then, some problems are already irreversible. The five-year mark is when corrections are still possible.

Five Years Out: Verify Your Foundation

Confirm your Service Computation Date for Retirement (RSCD). Pull your most recent SF-50 and look at Block 31 — but know that this block shows your SCD for Leave, not your SCD for Retirement. These two dates frequently diverge. Your agency's HR office or your electronic Official Personnel Folder should show your RSCD separately. If it doesn't, request a formal service computation from your servicing HR center.

Audit for uncredited service periods. Review every position you've held, including temporary appointments, intermittent positions, and military service. For FERS, civilian non-deduction service performed before January 1, 1989, is creditable only if you make a deposit. Service after that date with no retirement deductions withheld is generally not creditable at all. If you have eligible pre-1989 time, start the deposit process now — interest accrues until the deposit is paid.

Complete your military service buyback. If you served on active duty and haven't made your military service deposit (3% of active-duty basic pay plus interest), this is the highest-priority item on your list. You need to request estimated earnings from the Defense Finance and Accounting Service, file SF-3108 through your agency's payroll office, and make the full payment before your civilian separation date. Military time that isn't bought back doesn't count in your FERS annuity calculation.

Verify your FEHB enrollment continuity. To carry health insurance into retirement, you must have been continuously enrolled in FEHB (or covered as a family member under someone else's FEHB) for the five years immediately before your retirement. Gaps count. If you opted out at any point during the past five years, you need to re-enroll at the next Open Season and maintain continuous coverage from that point forward — which may push your earliest clean retirement date out.

Four Years Out: Validate Your High-3 Numbers

Request your salary history from payroll. Your high-3 average salary is the highest basic pay averaged over any 36 consecutive months of service. For most employees, this will be the final three years. Basic pay includes your GS grade/step salary and locality pay, but excludes overtime, bonuses, and the lump-sum annual leave payout.

Check for GS biweekly pay cap issues. If your basic pay plus locality adjustment has ever hit the biweekly pay cap (Executive Schedule Level IV), your high-3 may be lower than you expect. Your actual salary rate and your capped rate can diverge, and OPM uses the capped rate for the annuity calculation. This affects a small percentage of employees — primarily those in high-locality areas at upper GS-14 and GS-15 grades — but the dollar impact can be significant over 36 months.

Identify your retirement eligibility date. Map your RSCD, age, and years of service against the eligibility matrix: MRA with 30 years, age 60 with 20 years, age 62 with 5 years, or MRA with 10 years (subject to the 5% per year reduction). Knowing which eligibility path you're on affects every downstream decision, from when to start your annuity to whether the FERS Supplement kicks in.

Three Years Out: Benefits Elections and TSP Strategy

Review your FEGLI coverage. Federal Employees' Group Life Insurance comes with reduction options at retirement — Basic coverage can be kept with 75% Reduction, 50% Reduction, or No Reduction, each with different premium costs. Options A, B, and C have their own age-based premium tables. The five-year enrollment rule applies to FEGLI separately from FEHB. If you've waived any FEGLI coverage, the only way back in is through a qualifying life event or an Open Season (which Congress authorizes infrequently).

Model your survivor benefit election. Married employees must choose between the Maximum Survivor Annuity (50% of your unreduced annuity passed to your spouse, costing you a 10% reduction), the Partial Survivor Annuity (25% passed, 5% reduction), or no survivor annuity. Any election other than maximum requires your spouse's notarized consent on SF-3107-2. Run the numbers now so the conversation with your spouse isn't happening under deadline pressure.

Align your TSP allocation with your timeline. Three years out, your withdrawal strategy should start taking shape. If you plan to delay Social Security past 62, you'll need TSP withdrawals or other income to cover the gap. Under SECURE 2.0, the RMD age is 73 (born 1951–1959) or 75 (born 1960+), and Roth TSP balances are exempt from RMDs. The tax implications of traditional TSP withdrawals during years when you're also receiving annuity income and potentially Social Security are worth modeling before you commit to a distribution schedule.

Two Years Out: Reconcile Everything

Download your entire eOPF. Your electronic Official Personnel Folder contains every SF-50, performance action, award, and position change in your federal career. Download every document and verify that each appointment, grade change, and within-grade increase is reflected. Missing SF-50s — particularly from early-career positions, transfers between agencies, or periods of temporary service — are the single most common source of annuity calculation errors.

Request a formal retirement estimate from HR. Most agencies will prepare a detailed estimate upon request. Compare it line by line against your own calculations: the RSCD they're using, the high-3 salary figure, the total creditable service including sick leave, and the applicable multiplier (1.0% vs. 1.1%). Flag any discrepancy immediately.

Verify your sick leave balance trajectory. Unused sick leave is converted into additional service credit at retirement using the 2,087-hour work year (roughly 174 hours per month of credit). The balance on your final day of service is what counts — you cannot project forward and assume you won't use any. But you can estimate, and every additional month of credit adds to your annuity. The FERS Annuity Guide includes a conversion worksheet for mapping your current sick leave balance to its annuity impact.

One Year Out: Lock Down the Details

Decide your exact separation date. The last day of a month is typically optimal because your annuity begins the first day of the month following separation, giving you continuous income. Retiring on January 3 instead of December 31, for example, costs you an entire month's annuity payment. The specific date also matters for your annual leave lump-sum payout — the per-hour rate is calculated from your salary on the day of separation.

Confirm your beneficiary designations. Review SF-2823 (FEGLI designation of beneficiary), SF-3102 (FERS designation of beneficiary), and your TSP beneficiary designation. These are independent of your will and override it. An outdated designation — naming an ex-spouse, for example — can direct benefits exactly where you don't want them.

Attend your agency's pre-retirement seminar. Most agencies offer these, and they cover the mechanical filing process specific to your agency's HR systems. The content is basic, but the procedural details — which forms your agency requires, their internal processing timeline, and how they transmit your records to OPM — vary enough between agencies that the session is worth your time.

File SF-3107 at the right time. Most agencies recommend submitting your retirement application 60 to 90 days before your intended separation date. As of June 2026, OPM's processing time for finalized claims averaged 108 days, with digital applications averaging 96 days. During processing, you'll receive interim pay — typically 60% to 80% of your estimated annuity — so plan your cash flow for at least three to four months of reduced income.

The Audit That Ties It All Together

Every item on this checklist feeds into the same calculation: high-3 salary multiplied by years of creditable service multiplied by the applicable multiplier. An error in any input — an SCD that's off by 14 months because of an uncredited temporary appointment, a high-3 that's depressed by an undetected pay cap period, a sick leave balance that wasn't transmitted correctly — produces a permanently wrong annuity.

The FERS Annuity Guide provides the verification framework for each input parameter, including the specific SF-50 blocks to check, the formulas OPM applies, and the common discrepancies that cause claims to be returned for correction. If you're at the five-year mark, the window for catching these problems is open. At the one-year mark, some of them are already set in stone.

See more United States guides →