Q. I am 63 and a FERS employee, and I plan to retire this summer, but I want to reach 20 years of service to get 22 percent of my high-3 salary for my pension. I have 19 years and eight months of service and 1,600 hours of sick leave. My calculations indicate my sick leave will add four months to my service, so that I would have 20 years of service and could receive the higher multiplier (1.1 percent versus 1 percent). I have found regulations that indicate you cannot use sick leave for retirement eligibility, but I cannot find anything that addresses sick leave being used to qualify for the 1.1 percent retirement factor.
A. Sick leave cannot be used to meet the years of service requirement. It can only be added after you’ve met it. To have the enhanced multiplier used to compute your annuity, you’d need to have 20 years of actual service. If you had fewer than 20 years, the standard multiplier would be used.
