About FedAnnuity
What your service adds up to
A federal pension is one of the few large sums in a person's life that is worked out by a published formula rather than a negotiation. The rules are all written down, in OPM's own handbook, in plain English, for anyone to read. So it is strange how hard it is to find out what your own number actually is.
The calculators online mostly fall into three groups. Some want an email address before they will show you anything. Some are a lead form for an advisor, and the number is the bait. And the honest free ones tend to give you a single figure with nothing behind it — no factor named, no reduction itemized, no way to tell whether it modeled your sick leave or quietly ignored it. If the answer is wrong you have no way of knowing, because you were never shown the working.
FedAnnuity is the other thing. Every tool here is free, needs no account, and prints the arithmetic in full: which rule applied, which figure it produced, and the paragraph of the handbook it came from. You should be able to check us against OPM and find that we agree — and if we ever don't, to see exactly where we went wrong.
I am not a federal employee, and this site does not pretend otherwise. I have never worked for OPM, I cannot see your service record, and nothing here is an official determination of anything. What I do is read the published rules carefully and turn them into calculators that show their working.
That is a deliberate position rather than an apology for one. Because I have no insider standing to trade on, the only thing this site can offer is a chain you can follow yourself: every factor named, every reduction itemized, every figure linked to the paragraph of OPM's handbook or the section of Title 5 it comes from. You are not asked to trust me. You are asked to check.
Part of the Veraino network of free websites.
How it works
Every tool on FedAnnuity is grounded in a documented, citable method — a published formula, an authoritative standard, or a well-established model. We don't approximate or invent numbers. If we can't cite a primary source for the logic, we don't publish the tool.
For federal retirement there are only three kinds of source worth citing, and every calculator on this site is built from them: Title 5 of the U.S. Code, which is the statute itself; the OPM CSRS/FERS Handbook, which is OPM's own chapter-by-chapter restatement of how it administers that statute; and OPM's published tables and charts, such as the minimum retirement age table and the sick leave conversion chart. A blog post, a forum answer, or another calculator is not a source. If a rule cannot be traced to one of those three, the tool does not ship with it.
Before a calculator goes live its logic is written as a plain function with no interface attached, and checked against worked examples that can be verified by hand against the statute — so a failure points at a rule rather than at a rounding artifact. Every figure that could change is logged with the source that would signal the change and a date to re-read it. Tools that depend on such figures carry a visible last reviewed date, and where a tool deliberately does not model something, the page says so in its own section rather than leaving you to discover the gap.
Our commitments
- Free, no sign-up required. Every tool on this site is free to use with no account, subscription, or paywall.
- We show our work. Every tool explains its methodology, cites its sources, and surfaces assumptions — so you can verify the logic, not just trust the output.
- Honest about limitations. Where precision is limited or assumptions are required, we say so. Tools compute; they don't replace professional judgment.
- Kept current. Tools that use figures that can change over time carry a “last reviewed” date and are treated as an ongoing maintenance responsibility, not a one-time build.
Get in touch
Questions, corrections, or suggestions: hello@fedannuity.com. Eric reads every message personally.