Federal employee retirement requests and OPM's processing of retirement claims both rose in October. Douglas Rissing / Getty Images
OPM’s retirement backlog ticked up slightly last month, though other metrics improved
Statistics measuring the federal government HR agency’s performance in processing departing federal workers’ retirement claims remained stable following the backlog’s removal from OPM’s list of top management challenges.
The Office of Personnel Management reported a slight increase in the backlog of pending federal employee retirement claims in October, though still a marked improvement from the same period last year.
OPM received 6,872 new retirement requests from departing federal workers last month, an increase of around 1,250 more claims than in September. Though OPM cleared 6,458 claims—itself an increase of around 150 claims from the previous month—the backlog ticked up by around 400 cases to 14,908. OPM’s goal is a “steady state” of 13,000 pending retirement claims.
Despite that, the average time it takes to process a retirement claim fell from 63 to 62 days, as measured on a monthly basis.
October’s retirement statistics come just one month since OPM’s inspector general lauded the agency’s progress in reducing the backlog, formally removing it from its annual list of top management challenges, following a series of initiatives designed to improve the retirement process for federal workers.
Those initiatives included strategic staffing and overtime surges in response to the annual spike in applications each January, as well as an outreach campaign to help employees better navigate the process and avoid common pitfalls that can create delays.
The backlog of 14,908 at the end of October is nearly 2,000 lighter than the 16,678 claims that were pending a year ago. And the 62-day average processing time is an improvement of 11 days over the 73-day average in October 2023.