FERS Retirement Eligibility: Age, Service, and Pathway Requirements

The Three Immediate Unreduced Pathways

FERS retirement eligibility comes down to two variables: your age and your years of creditable service. There are three combinations that qualify you for an immediate, unreduced annuity — meaning your pension starts the first day of the month after you separate, with no permanent penalty:

MRA with 30 years of service. Your Minimum Retirement Age depends on your birth year. If you were born before 1948, it's 55. For birth years 1948 through 1969, it slides upward in two-month increments. Born 1970 or later, the MRA is 57. Hit your MRA with 30 years of creditable service and you qualify for the full pension plus the Special Retirement Supplement.

Age 60 with 20 years of service. No MRA lookup needed — it's a flat age-60 threshold paired with 20 years. You get the full pension and the supplement.

Age 62 with 5 years of service. The lowest service requirement, but the highest age threshold. If you retire at 62 with at least 20 years of service, your annuity multiplier bumps from 1.0% to 1.1% per year — a meaningful difference on a 25- or 30-year career.

The MRA+10 Reduced Option

If you've reached your MRA but have between 10 and 29 years of service, you can still retire immediately — but your annuity takes a permanent 5% reduction for each full year you're under age 62. An employee retiring at MRA of 57 with 15 years faces a 25% cut that never goes away.

There's a strategic alternative: instead of accepting the reduced annuity, you can separate at MRA+10 and postpone the start of your annuity to a later date. If you wait until age 60 with 20 years, or age 62, the reduction shrinks or disappears entirely. During the postponement period your FEHB and FEGLI coverages are suspended but reinstate when the annuity begins — provided you met the five-year enrollment rule at separation.

Deferred Retirement for Early Separators

If you leave federal service before reaching your MRA but have at least five years of creditable civilian service, you're eligible for a deferred retirement. You leave your contributions in the fund and apply for the annuity later — typically at age 62 with 5 years, or at your MRA with 10 years (subject to the 5% annual reduction).

The critical difference from postponed retirement: deferred retirees permanently forfeit their right to carry FEHB and FEGLI into retirement. Unused sick leave is also forfeited. This distinction between deferred and postponed retirement is one of the most consequential decisions a mid-career federal employee can make.

Verifying Your Creditable Service

The retirement eligibility pathways above assume your service computation date (SCD) is accurate. It often isn't. Common discrepancies that can push your actual SCD later than expected:

Military service. Post-1956 active duty only counts toward FERS if you've completed a military service deposit — 3% of basic military pay plus interest that begins accruing two years after your civilian hire date. An unpaid deposit means OPM excludes that time from both eligibility and the annuity computation.

Temporary civilian service. Non-deduction service performed before January 1, 1989, is creditable only if you pay a deposit of 1.3% of basic pay plus interest. Service after that date performed without retirement deductions is permanently non-creditable under FERS — no deposit option exists.

Refunded service. If you left federal service, withdrew your FERS contributions, and later returned, you can redeposit the refunded amount plus interest to restore credit for annuity computation. Without the redeposit, the service still counts toward eligibility but is excluded from the pension calculation.

Part-time service. Good news: part-time years count as full years for eligibility purposes. Twenty calendar years of part-time work satisfies the 20-year requirement. But OPM applies a proration factor to the annuity computation, scaling it by the ratio of actual hours worked to full-time hours.

The Five-Year FEHB Rule

Carrying health insurance into retirement requires five consecutive years of FEHB (or PSHB for postal employees) enrollment immediately before your annuity starting date. Gaps from non-federal employment are skipped in the calculation, as long as you re-enrolled within 60 days of returning to service. But if you fall short at retirement, OPM rarely grants waivers for voluntary separations — the expectation is that you should have continued working until the requirement was met.

Building Your Personal Timeline

Start the verification process at least three to five years before your target date. Pull your complete eOPF, compare the Leave SCD in Block 31 of your most recent SF-50 against your actual Retirement SCD, and flag any periods of non-covered, military, or temporary service that could move the date.

The FERS Retirement Eligibility & Timing Guide structures this into a chronological workflow — from the five-year audit through the 90-day pre-application step — with the service-credit verification steps that agency HR and OPM's online tools don't walk you through.

See more United States guides →