While the Office of Personnel Management received nearly 12,000 new retirement applications in April, it managed to process more than 17,000 claims. This progress made April the first month OPM’s retirement backlog has dropped below 50,000 unprocessed claims in more than five months.
The backlog is still high. A year ago (April 2025) the backlog was a little over 16,000 — about one-third of April 2026.
OPM’s Retirement Services (RS) is working towards a fully digital retirement application process. The agency is working with agencies and payroll offices to update legacy processes. During this period of transition, RS is still receiving many new retirement claims on paper. Of the 11,940 new retirement claims in April, 8,743 were digital and 3,197 were paper. According to OPM, The processing of digital cases is faster. With systematic checks of data, annuitants experience less delays due to missing information or incomplete packages.
OPM’s Processing Time of Retirement Applications
The monthly average processing time for April (including both digital and paper applications) increased to 78 days, up from 60 days in March. According to OPM, paper claims in April averaged 100 days to process and digital retirement application claims averaged 50 days. 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.
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