Reading Your First Annuity Statement

The first payment OPM sends you is an interim payment, not your annuity. It is smaller than the figure you computed, it is missing deductions you expected to see, and it will be corrected later with back pay. Almost every "my pension is wrong" panic in the first six months is this working exactly as designed.

This guide is different from every other one on this site in a way worth stating up front. Everywhere else, the rules come from statute — a section of Title 5, a CFR part, a numbered chapter of OPM's handbook. Interim pay is administrative practice. OPM decides how it runs and publishes the details on its own pages, which means the figures here are dated to when they were read rather than fixed by law, and some of what you will be told about interim pay elsewhere is not published by OPM at all.

The percentage nobody can cite

Search for how much interim pay you will get and you will be told 80% of your annuity, or 60–80%. Those numbers circulate widely across retirement blogs, forums and advisory sites.

OPM does not publish a percentage. Its own description is that interim payments "represent a portion of your final benefit." That is the whole of it. There is no OPM page, pamphlet or handbook chapter stating a fraction, which means the widely quoted figures have no primary source behind them — and a number with no source is exactly what this site exists not to repeat.

The practical consequence: you cannot plan a household budget on a specific interim figure, because nobody can honestly tell you what it will be. You can plan on it being meaningfully less than your computed annuity, arriving on the first business day of the month, and being made whole later.

What is withheld, and what is quietly not

OPM withholds only federal income tax from an interim payment. No state tax, and — the part that matters most — no FEHB or FEGLI premium.

Your health and life insurance coverage continues the whole time. You are insured. You are simply not paying for it yet. When adjudication finishes, OPM begins withholding those premiums retroactive to your annuity commencing date, which means every month of interim pay is collected at once out of a later payment.

This is the mechanism behind the second common panic: a retiree who has adjusted to the interim amount finally gets a corrected payment, sees back pay arrive, and then finds the next payment much lighter than expected. Nothing has gone wrong. The premiums for the interim months came due.

OPM also notes that federal tax withheld from your first interim payment is often higher than from later ones, because it makes withholding adjustments as it finishes processing.

How long it runs

OPM publishes its processing averages monthly and updates them. For cases processed in July 2026, the published averages were:

• 6 days to authorize interim pay — measured from when OPM receives the complete application package from your agency, not from your retirement date.
• 109 days to finish an immediate retirement — voluntary, early voluntary, discontinued service, and approved disability applications.
• 31 days for a monthly survivor annuity, and 79 days for a survivor lump sum, measured from OPM's receipt of the complete death benefits application.

The gap between those first two figures is the window interim pay exists to cover: a few days to start paying you something, roughly three and a half months to work out what you are actually owed. OPM states these are averages, and names what runs longer — a court order, a special computation, workers' compensation, missing documentation, and deferred or postponed applications, which are excluded from the 109-day figure entirely.

Treat these four numbers as dated, not fixed. They are a monthly snapshot that moves with OPM's backlog, and they were read from OPM's processing-times page in August 2026. Check the current page before relying on them.

What it looks like on a real career

Take an employee retiring at 62 with a high-3 of $98,400, 30 years of service, 1,200 hours of unused sick leave, and a full survivor election. Running that through the same engine the FERS annuity calculator uses gives a gross annuity of $2,751.10 a month — $33,013.20 a year at the 1.1% factor, with 6 months of sick leave credit folded in. After the survivor election, the net annuity is $2,475.99 a month.

That second figure is what the statement will eventually say. What arrives in the meantime cannot be worked out here, because OPM publishes no percentage to apply. Anyone showing you an interim figure for this career is guessing.

The catch-up can be sized, though, and it is the part that surprises people. Assume a FEHB and FEGLI premium of $520 a month — an input, not a published figure, since premiums vary by plan and enrollment. An adjudication running near the published 109-day average means roughly 4 monthly payments arrive with no premium deducted. When processing finishes, that $2,080 comes out retroactively. It arrives alongside back pay, so the net effect is usually positive — but it is a real $2,080 that a reader budgeting off the interim payments has already spent.

Your CSA number

When OPM establishes your claim it issues a seven-digit claim identification number prefixed CSA for your own retirement, or CSF for a survivor's. Every later interaction with OPM turns on it, and it is not your Social Security number, which is what the application was filed under. It arrives in the correspondence that accompanies interim pay, which is one reason that first envelope is worth keeping.

What this guide does not cover

It does not tell you what your interim payment will be, because that figure is not published and this site will not invent one. It does not cover the appeal or reconsideration process if the final computation is genuinely wrong rather than merely interim. It does not model the tax treatment of the back pay itself, which lands in the year it is paid rather than the year it was earned. And every processing figure here is a July 2026 snapshot of an average that OPM revises monthly — the one guide on this site whose numbers are administrative practice rather than statute, which is why they carry a month and a caution instead of a citation to law.

Once the interim period ends and a real statement arrives, the question changes from "why is this small" to "why is this smaller than the annuity I computed" — and that one has a statutory answer. The federal annuity tax calculator splits a gross annuity into the part the IRS simplified method treats as a tax-free return of your own contributions, the part that is taxable, and what the premiums and withholding leave behind.

This guide is informational only. It is not financial, tax, or legal advice, and FedAnnuity is not affiliated with OPM or the U.S. government. Retirement rules turn on the specific facts of a career, and only your agency and OPM can give you a binding figure.

Last reviewed: August 2026 · Against OPM Retirement Services — Annuity Payments and Retirement Processing Times.