OPM retirement claims backlog continued to grow in July

Retirement

OPM retirement claims backlog continued to grow in July

For the second month in a row, OPM’s retirement claims backlog has increased. This comes after trending down for three consecutive months.

Dana Sukontarak

August 7, 2024 2:48 pm

< a min read

Retirement claims data from the Office of Personnel Management in July showed that despite receiving less claims and processing more claims than in June, the backlog still increased in size for the second month in a row.

OPM received 6,451 retirement claims in July, 468 less than June’s total of 6,919 claims received. The agency processed 5,994 claims in July, 380 more than in June.

The backlog, however, still increased to 15,797 from a total of 15,340 in the prior month. This marks the second consecutive month-over-month increase, as the number of backlogged claims stood at 14,035 in May. For the three consecutive months prior to that, backlog numbers had been trending downward.

The backlog’s all-time high was 36,349 in March 2022.

Average processing time for retirement claims ticked slightly up from 64 days in June to 65 days in July. The fiscal year-to-date average processing time remains at 61 days where it has stood since March of this year.