While the Office of Personnel Management’s retirement application backlog declined by approximately 10% last month, there are still more than 55,600 unprocessed claims in its backlog. The retirement application volume has been nearly triple the rate as last year.
The primary cause of the high number of retirement claims is the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce the size of government. OPM Director Scott Kupor recently cited that 317,000 federal employees left the government in 2025. OPM recently implemented a digital retirement application system. While processing digital claims is faster, many paper claims are still coming in from federal agencies as the government transitions to the digital system.
According to OPM Retirement Services (RS):
— In March RS Received 14,759 new retirement claims; of these 8,830 were digital and 5,929 were paper.
— In March digital cases were processed in 39 days, and paper claims were processed in 79 days.
• In February RS Received 31,240 new retirement claims; of these 15,494 were digital and 15,746 were paper. The processing of digital cases is faster. With systematic checks of data, annuitants experience less delays due to missing information or incomplete packages.
•In February RS processed 18,149 new retirement claims; of these 7,054 were digital and 11,095 were paper.
•In February digital cases were processed in 34 days, and paper claims were processed in 95 days
OPM’s Processing Time of Retirement Applications
The monthly average processing time for February (including both digital and paper applications) decreased to 69 days, down from 72 in February. Note: The processing times are provided by OPM, and are an average. An individual applicant’s time may vary.
CSRS/FERS New Claims Processing Time
Below is the latest chart and table from OPM showing the progress for the several months.
OPM experiences its largest surges in retirement applications in January and February each year. OPM’s statistics indicate that about 26% of all retirement applications come in the first six weeks of the year.