The Office of Personnel Management’s retirement claims backlog saw some improvement in September. OPM cut its backlog by 2,111 claims, hitting a new six-year low point in its overall inventory. OPM received 6,768 claims in September, and managed to process 8,879, shrinking the backlog to the lowest it has been in six years: 15,852.

The previous record was set in June 2023, when the backlog reached 16,370.

Though the inventory backlog reached a new low, OPM still has room for improvement, as it’s still nearly 3,000 claims above its “steady state” goal of 13,000.

OPM did make progress on their average processing time for September, as it took 70 days, tying the monthly average set in April 2023.

OPM said in September that retirement cases completed in less than 60 days on average took 40 days to process. Meanwhile, cases that took more than 60 days on average took 122 days to fully process.

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