January’s Retirement Rush Not as Bad as 2018

The usual influx of new retirements that comes in January is not as bad as it was last year, but OPM still has a bigger backlog to deal with.

The annual surge of new retirement applications that come at the start of a calendar year has pushed the backlog of retirement claims to a level not seen since around this time last year at the Office of Personnel Management.

It will be interesting to see if February has as many new retirement applications as it did in 2018. Last year, over 13,000 new retirement applications came in February on top of the over 14,000 in January which gave the backlog a big boost.

If this report is any indication, it suggests that the shutdown that started just before Christmas did not increase the number of retirement applications to kick off the year (not so far anyway).

The latest complete retirement backlog statistics from OPM are included below.

MonthClaims ReceivedClaims ProcessedInventory (Steady state goal is 13,000)Monthly Average Processing Time in DaysFYTD Average Processing Time in Days
Oct-178,8506,81818,8606464
Nov-175,5725,13819,2946866
Dec-175,56810,34714,5156063
Jan-1814,5908,63820,4676363
Feb-1813,2909,53224,2254659
Mar-187,76713,26218,7304957
Apr-188,3909,63117,4895857
May-187,6257,09018,0245858
Jun-189,3979,22318,1986559
Jul-188,2818,14518,3345759
Aug-188,8269,64717,5135658
Sep-187,1427,02717,6286459
Oct-189,0126,91119,7296363
Nov-187,5108,07719,1626162
Dec-185,7826,92518,0196061
Jan-1913,2648,16223,1215860

About the Author

Ian Smith is one of the co-founders of FedSmith.com. He has over 20 years of combined experience in media and government services, having worked at two government contracting firms and an online news and web development company prior to his current role at FedSmith.