By Scott Kupor, Director, U.S. Office of Personnel Management
October 3, 2025

A few weeks ago, we took you 200 feet underground to the Pennsylvania mines where the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) manages retirement services for the roughly 2.8 million federal annuitants. Because we are now starting to see the first wave of new retirement applications from the government’s Deferred Resignation Program (DRP), we wanted to give you some inside baseball on the inner workings of the retirement process and what we are doing to help federal employees ease into retirement.

For the past 50+ years (and even longer), retirement applications have been processed in one way - on paper. Retirees worked on paper applications, human resources (HR) departments completed paper forms and payroll providers sent OPM paper employment/pay histories – each delivered courtesy of snail mail. And the dedicated OPM team literally thumbed through these physical papers to manually calculate (with the help of our friends at Microsoft Excel) the final benefits owed to a retiree.

In spite of this manual process, the team has adjudicated on average about 8,000 applications per month, within 90 days of the applicant’s retirement date, and within 60 days of receiving the application.

Why so long?

Well, OPM traditionally doesn’t even receive the retirement application until almost 30 days from the retirement date. The applicant may complete her form quickly, but the process of application review by the HR agency that employed the retiree can take up to two weeks and then the payroll providers can add another two weeks to provide all historical compensation information. OPM needs the payroll information because, among other things, the starting basis for calculating annuitant pay is the “High Three,” or the average of the three highest consecutive salaries the annuitant received at any time during their employment.

And in 20% of the cases OPM reviews, the application is “unhealthy,” causing further delays in processing. “Unhealthy” is a euphemism for “something is wrong” with the application – e.g., some document wasn’t signed, a divorce decree wasn’t provided. So, we need to get those things. And, of course, we use the postal service to mail OPM the updated documents because – well – we love paper!

That was then, this is now.

That paper process is all – ok, “mostly” – history as of today. Introducing the Online Retirement Application (ORA).

Today, ORA automates the front-end of the retirement process. It converts a paper-based/snail mail-based application process into a seamless online experience. Applicants, HR departments, and payroll providers now have an online system to perfect a retirement application and deliver it – electronically – to OPM. ORA integrates with a digital file system (DFS) that enables the OPM team to review all of the required documents online (vs on paper) and with an online annuity calculator (JANUS) that helps compute the annuitants' monthly check amount.

Admittedly, we have a lot of additional development work to get to nirvana – which, at least in my mind, would mean we never have to print another piece of paper or do another manual calculation. In effect, instant retirement for 100% of government retirees. But we are well on our way.

What does all of this mean for the many upcoming retirees that we expect to have from the DRP program – starting as of September 30 and extending through December 31?

First, some numbers.

Currently, we have about 35,000 retirement applications pending in ORA with a September retirement date. That means – if history is a good predictor of the future – we expect OPM to receive that number of applications in the next 2-3 weeks. Yes, that’s a lot.

So, what are we doing about this? Meet my friend, “Interim Pay.”

Because OPM needs some time to perfect a retirement application, we aim to get retirees some money as quickly as possible. Interim Pay is the mechanism to do that – typically, we do a rough calculation based on the available data we have and pay most retirees 80% of their expected annuity within 30 days of OPM receiving an application.   

But, “most” is not enough given the volume of retirees we are seeing. Rather, we are going to increase the number of retirees that we can put into interim pay with a goal of getting 80% of retirees a check within 30 days of receipt of their application and the remainder within 60 days. In some cases, we will undoubtedly underpay a retiree and in others we may overpay. Neither of these situations are catastrophic or irreversible – we will true up to the “right” amount as we perfect an application. Job number one is getting cash into the hands of a retiree.

We are also working closely with our HR and payroll partners to accelerate their ability to send OPM completed and “healthy” applications as close in time to a retiree’s separation date as possible. The good news is that ORA provides us a level of visibility we didn’t previously have with the paper-based process, so we can better enable this partnership.

In addition, ORA itself will help speed up our processing time. It’s too early to forecast the precise efficiency gains since we are rolling this out for the first time, but there is no doubt that the online process – and integration with DFS and JANUS – will yield greater throughput for the team.

We are also augmenting our team for this busy season and rolling out a series of incentive programs for our existing employees to reward them for their dedication and time investment to helping our retirees get a check in their bank account as soon as possible.

And finally, in terms of customer service, we have made a number of enhancements to our customer support processes and technology to help better service our customers, including the ability for common support questions to be handled via self-service on our website and phone systems.

Yes, we have a lot of work to do to get to a fully digital future – this is a marathon, not a sprint. But we are making great progress against a 50+ year vexing problem that has not served our federal retirees with the respect and dignity that they deserve.

To everyone applying for retirement, we are working diligently to make your transition as smooth as possible. To our valued agency HR and payroll partners, your collaboration is essential and much appreciated. Together, we will meet this moment.