Browsing: High-3

Q. I am a 48-year-old FERS employee and considering resignation with almost 28 years of federal service. If I resign now (age 48), at age 60 do I submit a request to the Office of Personnel Management to collect pension high-3 (28 years of service)? If this is so, would this be considered a postponed or deferred retirement?

Q. What is determined to be my high-3? Is it based on my last three years of civil service employment prior to retirement or is it the highest three earning years during the course of my career?

Q. I keep hearing that for a Department of Defense civilian with the Army deploying to Afghanistan, danger pay is included in the high-3. I know differential and overtime are not covered. Can you shed some light on this?

Q. What impact does USERRA have on the high-3 calculation? For instance, please consider a hypothetical situation in which a civilian employee/military reservist earned annual income from his civilian federal agency of $96,000 one year, then $98,000 the next and then is making $100,000 when called to active duty at the end of the next year. He is activated for two years, during which time the GS scale gets annual 3 percent increases across the board. He comes back and works a final year, pays his military deposit, then retires after another 3 percent increase gives him an entire year…

Q. Is a temporary promotion of less than or equal to 120 days included in your high-3 computation for retirement (assuming the promotion was within your last 3 years of service)?

Q. I was forced to take a FERS Disability Retirement and was approved, but the Office of Personnel Management put me on regular earned rate retirement because I bought back my military time which then gave me 20 years of federal time and I just turned 60 years old. Should OPM not have counted my military buyback until age 62 when I would have converted over to regular retirement? I thought I would be getting 60 percent of my high-3 the first year then 40 percent the second year then go into retirement with 1.1 percent of my high-3.