Federal Retirement Backlog Triples; OPM Says Digital Processing Helping

Federal retirees are facing delays in retirement processing as the backlog swells to end 2025, triple the amount from last year. This is due to a confluence of factors, including the thousands of workers exiting the federal government due to the Deferred Resignation Program (DRP) and other reasons, and a switch to an online retirement system. 

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) received nearly 44,000 retirement applications at its retirement operations center in Pennsylvania in October and November 2025. During the same two months of 2024, OPM received 13,680 applications for processing. 

OPM currently has about 48,396 applications awaiting final processing, compared to just 13,844 at the end of November 2024. 

In addition, many of these applications are still being sent in on paper, despite OPM saying it would no longer accept paper submissions earlier this year. In November, just 7,833 of the nearly 24,000 total claims received were submitted digitally via its Online Retirement Application (ORA).  

Average processing time was 79 days in October and 66 days in November. Digital processing times were much faster, averaging 38 days in November.

Retiring feds tell Federal News Network that the delays leave them in the dark and require persistence.

“I’m pretty happy that worked out, but getting there really required several months of working with my HR specialist,” said one now-retired employee with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). “I think there were some points that she was ready to pull her hair out.”

OPM officials however say they are working as fast as they can, and say digital is helping.

“A surge like this would be extremely difficult for our legacy processing to work — it just wasn’t built for something like this,” said OPM’s deputy associate director for Retirement Services Kimya Lee during a Dec. 9 Chief Human Capital Officers (CHCO) Council meeting. “Despite record high retirement volumes this year, ORA is performing well. This gives us confidence as we prepare for retirement activities in 2025 and into 2026.”

OPM: 92% of Departures Voluntary

Meanwhile, OPM says that 92 percent of the 317,000 departures in the federal workforce so far in 2025 were voluntary.  

OPM Director Scott Kupor posted on X that those employees left on their own volition and “received severance of up to 8 months as a result of new programs that the government put in place to help ease the transition.”

But some employees who took the DRP told GovExec that is not the case, saying they felt they had no choice because they thought their unit was going to be shut and their job eliminated. 

“The conditions under which we made our decisions were far from voluntary," said former IRS employee Joshua Hughes, who said he accepted the offer after being told his Enterprise Case Management Office was being dissolved. "I would have never left if given a choice."

But the administration disagrees.

“The Deferred Resignation Program was fully voluntary, full stop,” said OPM spokesperson McLaurine Pinover. “No one was forced to sign up.”