OPM Retirement Backlog: Wait Times, Interim Pay, and Progress

The OPM retirement backlog peaked at 65,237 pending claims in February 2026 — the highest level in more than a decade — and has since fallen to 38,547 as of the end of May 2026.¹² If you’re one of the retirees still waiting, the short version is this: most people receive interim payments of about 80% of their estimated annuity roughly a week after their application reaches OPM, but the application itself can spend months getting there. Full adjudication at OPM is currently averaging 66 days for digital claims and 87 days for paper.³

How Long Your Claim Will Actually Take

The single biggest factor in your processing time is whether your application was filed digitally or on paper. In February 2026, digital claims averaged 34 days at OPM while paper claims took 95 days.¹ By May, the gap had narrowed but remained real: 66 days digital versus 87 paper. The overall fiscal-year 2026 average is 73 days across all claim types and 46 days for digital-only.³

Not every claim type takes the same time. OPM’s February 2026 figures put survivor annuity claims at 24 days and survivor lump sum claims at 38 days, while immediate retirements averaged 71 days.⁴

Certain complications will push your case well past those averages. Divorce-related court orders, special annuity computations for law enforcement officers or firefighters, workers’ compensation offsets, federal service spanning multiple agencies, and incomplete documentation all extend the timeline.³

Most of the Wait Happens Before OPM Gets Your File

A point OPM has repeatedly emphasized is that the longest delays usually occur before an application ever reaches its desk. The average retirement application spends roughly 120 days in transit: about 14 days with the applicant, 60 days with the former agency’s HR office, and 51 days with the payroll provider, which must finalize pay and upload payroll history so OPM can calculate the pension.⁵

As of January 2026, roughly 107,000 applications were in the Online Retirement Application system. About 30% were sitting with payroll providers, 12% with agency HR teams, and 8% with the applicants themselves. Only about half had actually reached OPM.⁵ The standard four-to-six-week handoff has reportedly stretched much longer as the volume of separations overwhelmed HR offices and payroll centers.³ Some 2025 retirement claims were still stuck at the agency or payroll level well into 2026, leaving those retirees with no annuity payments at all.⁶

If your annuity hasn’t started and you don’t know why, this is where to look first. Once you’ve separated, you lose your government email, which makes reaching your former HR office harder — a problem members of Congress have specifically flagged for OPM.⁷

What Interim Pay Covers

While your file is being adjudicated, OPM puts most retirees on interim pay. These partial payments typically cover about 80% of the estimated full annuity.⁶ OPM reports that most retirees receive their first interim payment within seven to eight days after the application arrives at the agency.⁴ Director Scott Kupor has said getting interim pay flowing is “the most important thing in the short term” and that the rate of automatic interim payments — where no human intervention is needed — has climbed to 75%, up from a historical 30%.⁸

Two caveats matter for your budget. The 80% is an average, and during an earlier backlog crisis some retirees received as little as 31% of their estimated annuity, with the FERS Retirement Supplement often excluded — a loss of hundreds of dollars per month for eligible retirees.⁹ And interim pay doesn’t start until your file reaches OPM, which as noted above can take four months or more. Financial planners have advised federal retirees to hold a cushion of roughly six months of living expenses to get through the processing period.³

Why the Backlog Got This Bad

More than 400,000 federal employees left their jobs after President Trump took office in January 2025, producing a net loss of roughly 285,000 workers.¹⁰ The departures came through the Deferred Resignation Program, large-scale reductions in force, terminations of probationary staff, and voluntary early retirement offers.¹¹ A particularly large wave of roughly 60,000 retirees separated at the end of fiscal year 2025.¹²

The monthly data shows the surge clearly. Pending claims went from 34,587 in October 2025 to 48,396 in November, 50,566 in December, 54,018 in January 2026, and peaked at 65,237 in February.¹ February alone brought in 31,240 new claims against 18,149 processed. For scale: OPM received just 3,202 claims in February 2016.³

OPM itself lost staff at the same time. A November 2025 Inspector General report found the agency was on track to lose more than 1,000 employees — about a third of its workforce — by year-end.¹¹ The Retirement Services division lost more than 100 staff, and the contact center dropped from 150 representatives to 115 between January 2025 and January 2026.⁷ Director Kupor acknowledged that “we may have made some mistakes where we need to hire back some people.”

Progress and What’s Still Uncertain

The tide began turning in March 2026, when OPM processed more than 22,000 claims against about 14,800 received, cutting the inventory by roughly 9,600.⁶ Incoming volume kept dropping — 11,940 in April, 11,286 in May — while OPM set a processing record of 19,433 in May, nearly double the previous May high of 10,954 set in 2013.² Through the first eight months of fiscal 2026, OPM took in 145,059 claims versus 75,621 in the same period a year earlier and processed 119,451, described as a record pace over the past 25 years.³

The main engine behind that speed is the Online Retirement Application. OPM mandated agency use by June 2, 2025, and stopped accepting paper submissions on July 15, 2025.¹³¹⁴ The system pulls in agency payroll data, lets applicants upload supporting documents, and runs automated checks that catch errors before submission.⁶³

The transition isn’t finished. As of April 2026, some agencies including the General Services Administration and the U.S. Postal Service remained in “interim adoption status,” and the system was not yet fully integrated for disability, deferred, and postponed retirement cases.⁷ Some retiring employees also have older personnel records that exist only in physical form, which requires paper handling regardless of the digital system.¹⁴

The 38,547 claims still pending at the end of May 2026 represent roughly two months of processing work at current output, down from more than three months earlier in the year. The May intake of about 11,300 claims is still 59% above the ten-year historical average, so whether your wait continues to shrink depends on OPM sustaining its record processing pace with reduced staff, on the remaining paper-heavy cases and un-onboarded agencies migrating to digital, and on the pre-OPM pipeline through agency HR and payroll offices shortening as separation volumes normalize.²

1
OPM. Retirement Processing Status
2
FedSmith. Record Processing Month Slashes OPM Retirement Backlog to Lowest Level Since Fall
3
Government Executive. A Record Number of Feds Are Retiring. Will It Slow Your Claim?
4
OPM. Retirement Processing Times
5
OPM. Peeling the Onion on Federal Retirement Processing
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Federal News Network. House Democrats Deepen Investigation Into Federal Retirement Delays
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Rep. James Walkinshaw. Letter to OPM Director Kupor
8
FedScoop. OPM Director Scott Kupor on Automated Federal Retirement System
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NTEU. Federal Retirement Processing Testimony
10
Federal News Network. Federal Workforce Cuts, Personnel Policy Changes Remain Top of Mind
11
OPM Office of Inspector General. Top Management Challenges for Fiscal Year 2026
12
Government Executive. OPM’s New Blog Touts Modernization While Retirees Wait for Answers During Shutdown
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Government Executive. OPM’s Digital Retirement Application Is Live
14
Federal News Network. OPM Wants Federal Retirement Processing Fully Digitized in Three Weeks’ Time