Q. My official retirement date is Jan. 29, 2016. Am I correct in saying that I won’t receive my first annuity check until March 1?
READ: 10 questions all soon-to-be-retirees ask
A. No. While you’ll be entitled to your first annuity payment on March 1, it’s unlikely that you’d receive any payment before April 1. In all likelihood, that would be an interim payment, which would be a percentage of the actual amount you may be due. (Interim payments are made to reduce the possibility of overpayments.) When your retirement application is finalized, you’ll receive a retroactive payment to cover any shortfall occurring from March 1 forward.
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Sir,
First annuity pay is my interim pay. Which means this pay is not the final annuity I have to receive monthly?
Yes, interim pay is a percentage of the amount OPM hopes you will be entitled to when it finishes adjudicating your retirement claim. When it does, your first regular annuity payment will include any money you are owed from previous interim payments.
I already received 2 consecutive months of interim pay. How many months it usually take for OPM to finish adjudicating my retirement? Thanks
While it usually depends on OPM’s workload, staffing level, and the complexity of a given case, most cases are resolved in two or three months. However, the usual end-of-year flood of retirement applications coupled with staffing shortages caused by COVID-19 and the Omicron variant have made it impossible to predict when cases will be finalized.