By Scott Kupor, Director, U.S. Office of Personnel Management
January 23, 2026

One of the reasons I joined this administration was to help make large, complex systems work better for the people who rely on them. That is particularly important when it comes to our federal retirement system. Ensuring public servants can retire with confidence, dignity, and timely benefits is one of OPM’s most fundamental responsibilities and it’s an area where we’ve been driving real improvements. Our goal is very simple – get retirement benefits into the hands of retirees as quickly and accurately as possible – full stop!

As you may be aware, we have experienced an historically large number of federal employees retiring from September through December last year (largely driven by the voluntary retirement programs implemented at the beginning of this administration, on top of our normal annual retirement numbers. We estimate that retirement volumes will be roughly 50% higher and could reach roughly twice historical levels.)

As I’ve written about previously, we are also undertaking a major modernization project that is designed to completely eliminate the manual, paper-based retirement process and replace it with a fully online system (called ORA, Online Retirement Application). And we are making amazing progress on that – as of today, there are roughly 107,000 retirement applications in ORA and – this week, for the first time – we are starting to see new ORA applications exceeding those still coming in via the paper route.

ORA offers a ton of advantages – including faster processing times, greater visibility into where the bottlenecks may be in the system, and greater transparency and ease of use for the applicant, agency HR personnel, payroll providers, and of course, OPM staff.

But it can’t perform miracles (at least not yet), so I wanted to take a minute to give you the inside baseball on the lifecycle of an ORA application and how we are optimizing the retirement process.

The retirement process starts with the applicant, who completes the ORA application fully online. As of today, it is taking annuitant applicants roughly 14 days on average to complete the application. [Keep in mind that is total elapsed time from start to finish; it doesn’t take 14 days’ worth of work, but we understand some folks have more important things to do in their daily routine than filling out applications!]. 

From there, ORA automatically routes the application the agency HR organization. So, if I retire from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the good folks at HHS’s HR department will add all of the relevant employment-related data to my application. As of today, ORA applications are sitting in the agency HR departments for an average of 60 days.

The final routing step once HR completes its work is for ORA to send the application to the agency’s payroll provider (there are about five major payroll providers across government). Payroll does two things – at least as far as I know! One is they process any final pay owed to the annuitant (particularly if there is unused, accrued vacation owed). Two is they upload into ORA the full payroll history of the applicant so OPM can ultimately calculate the pension amounts. As of today, ORA applications are sitting in the payroll organizations for an average of 51 days.

Here’s the reality: OPM does not receive a fully completed application and cannot begin its work – on average – for about 120 days from when the applicant starts the application process.

So, where are those 107,000 total ORA applications sitting today?  Roughly half are at OPM (more on that later), but 30% are sitting with the payroll providers; 12% are sitting with agency HR teams, and 8% are sitting with the applicant.

That matters, because when cases do reach OPM, we move quickly. We are issuing interim pay immediately in about 75% of cases, and on average within seven days in 100% of cases. That means, on average,  within seven days of receiving the application, annuitants will be getting 80% of their expected final post-adjudication payout. Making sure retirees have money in their bank accounts as fast as possible is our first priority, and our performance there is strong.

And we are also seeing huge dividends from ORA in the time it takes for us to complete the final review of an annuitant’s case and deliver them 100% of their earned pension. As of today, we are completing ORA applications in less than 40 days from when we receive them in OPM. To give you a reference point, it takes at least twice as long for us to adjudicate paper-based cases. So, we are moving in the right direction.

But we are not complacent with the status quo and will continue to do even better. We are working with the HR and Payroll providers to help reduce the time it takes for them to complete their ORA work, and we are continuously rolling out new ORA features that expand the types of cases we can handle and will reduce adjudication times further.

And customer service is very important to us at OPM, and we are committed to providing courteous and timely assistance. Before your retirement application reaches OPM, please contact your agency’s HR office for updates, or refer to ORA for status tracking. Once we have received your application, we will be glad to assist you with any questions regarding its processing.

Time is money and we are committed to getting federal employees the efficient, timely, and reliable retirement system they deserve.