Your HR estimate is not OPM’s computation

1. Two different documents

An agency estimate is produced by your HR office or a benefits system from the data it holds about you. It is a planning tool. It is usually careful and usually close. It is not a determination, it binds nobody, and it is only as good as the service history sitting in the agency's records.

OPM's computation happens after you separate. OPM receives your complete retirement package, audits the record, resolves anything ambiguous, and produces the figure that governs. That is the number that appears on your annuity statement for the rest of your life.

Most of the time they agree within a small margin. When they do not, it is almost never because someone multiplied wrong. It is because the two offices hold different facts about your service.

2. The six things that go wrong

Notice the pattern: four of the six push the real figure down. Estimates tend to be optimistic because they credit service that looks creditable on its face and would only be disqualified by a document nobody pulled.

3. The SCD trap

You have more than one service computation date, and they are frequently different.

The leave SCD sets your annual leave accrual rate. It includes service — certain military time, some non-federal service in specific circumstances — that counts for leave but not for retirement.

The retirement SCD governs your annuity. It reflects creditable service only, and it moves depending on whether deposits were paid.

The leave SCD is the one printed in the obvious place on an SF-50, which is exactly why people read it, plug it into a calculator, and arrive at an estimate that is months or years too generous. If someone hands you an estimate, ask which date it used.

4. Checking it yourself

This is a document exercise, not a memory exercise.

• Pull every SF-50 from your eOPF and lay them out as a continuous service history. Look for gaps, temporary appointments, and any period of non-federal or seasonal work.
• Identify the retirement SCD, not the leave SCD, and reconcile it against that history.
• Find a paid-in-full receipt for every deposit and redeposit. A memory of having paid is not evidence. If you cannot find it, it was not paid as far as the record is concerned.
• Flag every part-time period and confirm the proration was applied.
• Establish your actual high-3 window — the highest three consecutive years of basic pay including locality. Usually the last three; not always, especially after a move to a lower-locality area or a downgrade.
• Check the sick leave balance on your most recent leave and earnings statement.
• Run the formula yourself — high-3 × multiplier × years — and compare. The mechanics are in the FERS pension calculation.

If your figure and the estimate differ by more than a rounding margin, the gap is telling you something specific. Find it before you file.

5. Fix it before you separate

Timing is the whole point of this article. Most of these problems are correctable while you are an employee and much harder afterward.

• Deposits and redeposits generally must be paid before separation. Once you are gone, the opportunity for several categories is closed. This is the single most time-sensitive item.
• Service verification is easier from inside. Your HR office can request records from other agencies and the National Personnel Records Center on your behalf; after separation you are doing it yourself.
• Corrected SF-50s take time. If an action was recorded wrongly years ago, fixing it is a process, not a phone call.
• Sick leave discrepancies are resolved with payroll, and payroll stops being your payroll on your last day.

Start this eighteen months out if you can, and no later than the point at which you would otherwise file. The full sequence is in the retirement application and, for a year-end date, the December 31 countdown.

6. If OPM comes out lower

It happens, and the first question is not how to appeal but which number is right. OPM audited the record; the estimate did not. Often OPM is simply correct and the estimate credited service that was never creditable.

So: ask OPM in writing for the computation. Not the total — the components. Creditable service by period, the high-3 and the window used, which deposits were treated as paid, and any reductions applied.

Then compare it against your documents. If the record is genuinely wrong — a deposit you can prove you paid, a period of service the audit missed — the route is a reconsideration request supported by those documents. The agency estimate is not evidence and carries no weight; the SF-50s and receipts do.

And if the shortfall creates a cash problem in the meantime, note that the annuity you are receiving during the interim period is itself an estimate. The mechanics of that gap are in surviving the OPM wait, and if an interim overpayment later has to be recovered, the overpayment process covers what follows.

7. Frequently asked questions