Federal Sick Leave Conversion Chart for Retirement

The federal sick leave conversion chart for retirement translates your unused sick leave hours into extra months and days of creditable service, which then get added to your service time in the annuity formula. The Office of Personnel Management publishes the chart in its Retirement Facts 8 pamphlet and in the CSRS/FERS Handbook, built on a 2,087-hour work year. Roughly 174 hours of unused sick leave equals one additional month of service credit.¹

How to Read the Chart

The chart is a grid. Months run across the top, days run down the side, and each cell holds an hour value. Find the number on the chart closest to your unused sick leave balance, then read across and up to see how many months and days of service credit that balance is worth.²

One rule matters more than any other when reading it: if your balance lands between two numbers on the chart, you use the next higher figure, not the lower one. OPM rounds in your favor.¹

A few reference points from the chart give you the scale:

504 hours convert to 2 months and 27 days of service
1,003 hours convert to 5 months and 23 days
1,502 hours convert to 8 months and 14 days
2,087 hours convert to a full year

Your sick leave balance appears on your Leave and Earnings Statement. Confirm the figure with your human resources office before you retire, because the balance carried on your final statement is the one OPM uses to run the conversion.

Where the 2,087 Comes From

OPM uses a fixed standard of 2,087 hours per year. That figure is the average of all possible work hours across a 28-year calendar cycle, which smooths out how weekdays and leap years shift over time.³ Divide 2,087 by 12 and you get about 174 hours per month. So an employee retiring with 1,000 hours of unused sick leave picks up roughly five and a half months of extra service time. Other federal payroll contexts use 2,080; the retirement calculation does not.

Who Gets the Credit

Both retirement systems allow unused sick leave to count toward the annuity, and for anyone retiring now the full balance counts under either one. CSRS employees have long received credit for 100 percent of the balance under 5 USC 8339.⁴ FERS employees receive credit for 100 percent as well, provided they separate on or after January 1, 2014.⁵

There are limits worth knowing before you rely on the credit:

The credit applies only when you retire on an immediate annuity or die in service leaving survivors entitled to an annuity. If you separate before meeting age and service requirements and later claim a deferred annuity, your sick leave balance does not count.⁴
Sick leave cannot be used to meet the minimum service you need to qualify for retirement in the first place.¹
It does not factor into your high-3 average salary.¹
There is no lump-sum payout. The service-time credit is the only retirement value the hours carry.

Adding the Credit to Your Service

Once you pull the months and days from the chart, you add them to your actual years, months, and days of creditable federal service. Say you worked 29 years and 6 months, and your sick leave converts to 6 months and 10 days. The combined total is 30 years and 10 days.

After you combine, OPM rounds the total down to the nearest full month. In the example above, those 10 leftover days drop off and you are left with exactly 30 years for pension purposes.¹ If you are close to a full-month threshold as you approach retirement, even a handful of extra hours can push you across it and add another month to the calculation.

What the Extra Service Is Worth

The dollar value depends on which system covers you.

CSRS

CSRS uses a tiered formula applied to your high-3 average salary: 1.5 percent per year for the first 5 years, 1.75 percent for years 6 through 10, and 2 percent for each year beyond 10.⁶ Most CSRS employees with enough tenure for sick leave credit to matter are well past year 10, so each extra year the chart gives them is worth 2 percent of the high-3. On a $100,000 high-3, an extra year adds $2,000 to the annual annuity. Six months adds about $1,000 a year, for life.

FERS

FERS pays 1 percent of the high-3 per year of service, or 1.1 percent if you retire at 62 or later with at least 20 years.⁷ On a $100,000 high-3, one extra year of service credit from sick leave adds $1,000 a year at the standard rate or $1,100 at the enhanced rate. Smaller than CSRS per year, but still meaningful over a long retirement.

How Sick Leave Accumulates

Full-time federal employees earn 4 hours of sick leave every biweekly pay period, or 104 hours a year.⁸ There is no cap. Balances carry over from year to year without limit, and an employee who uses sick leave sparingly across a 30-year career can bank 2,000 or more hours, which converts to nearly a full extra year of credited service.

If you leave federal service and later return, your prior sick leave balance is recredited to you with no time limit on the restoration, a rule that has been in place since December 2, 1994.⁹

1
United States Office of Personnel Management. Retirement Facts 8 – Credit for Unused Sick Leave Under the Civil Service Retirement System
2
United States Office of Personnel Making. Retirement Facts 8 – Credit for Unused Sick Leave Under the Civil Service Retirement System
3
U.S. Office of Personnel Management. Computing Hourly Rates of Pay Using the 2,087-Hour Divisor
4
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 5 USC 8339 – Computation of Annuity
5
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 5 USC 8415 – Computation of Basic Annuity
6
U.S. Office of Personnel Management. CSRS Computation
7
U.S. Office of Personnel Management. FERS Computation
8
U.S. Office of Personnel Management. Sick Leave – General Information
9
U.S. Office of Personnel Management. Leave Policy FAQ – Recrediting Sick Leave After Break in Service