WASHINGTON, DC – Today, the US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) announced the “Last Day of Paper,” officially ending paper retirement processing for more than 95 percent of federal retirement applications and completing the agency’s transition to a fully digital retirement process.

For decades, federal retirement applications relied on a paper-based process that required physical documents to move between agencies, payroll providers, and OPM’s Retirement Operations Center in Boyers, Pennsylvania. As of yesterday, nearly all retirement applications will be submitted and processed electronically through OPM’s Online Retirement Application (ORA), eliminating paper from the process and significantly reducing processing times.

The milestone follows rapid adoption of ORA, which has processed more than 155,000 retirement applications over the past year after serving only a few hundred users during its initial rollout.

“Today we’re closing the book on one of the federal government’s oldest paper processes,” OPM Director Scott Kupor said. “For decades, retirement applications were literally mailed around the country before reaching OPM. That’s over. By moving retirement online, we’re delivering faster decisions, better service, and greater transparency for federal employees while modernizing an essential government function.”

The transition enables retirees, agency human resources offices, payroll providers, and OPM to work from a single electronic record throughout the retirement process, reducing delays caused by paper handling and manual transfers.

As part of today’s milestone, OPM is also launching new capabilities designed to accelerate retirement processing, including:

• A new pre-retirement application that allows employees and agency HR offices to complete much of the retirement process before an employee’s separation date.
• Earlier processing of retirement applications while final payroll information is still being finalized, reducing unnecessary delays.
• A commitment to issue a retiree’s first pension payment within seven days of retirement for applicants who submit a complete retirement package by their separation date.

Today’s announcement marks another step in OPM’s broader effort to modernize Retirement Services. OPM is continuing work to digitize hundreds of millions of historical retirement records, expand online self-service tools for annuitants, and deploy new AI-enabled customer service capabilities to improve support for retirees.