Frequently Asked Questions

At minimum you'll need your date of birth, your Service Computation Date (SCD) from your SF-50 or earnings statement, and your current high-3 salary (or current salary as a proxy). TSP balance, Social Security estimates, and leave balances improve accuracy but are optional to start.

Your SCD appears on your SF-50 (Notification of Personnel Action). Look for the field labeled “SCD-Ret” or “Ret SCD.” It also appears on your LES (Leave and Earnings Statement) under the service section. Your agency HR office can also confirm it.

An account is only required to unlock Pro features and manage your subscription. You can run the full wizard and view your Readiness Score on the free tier without signing up. Your retirement data is saved locally in your browser's storage, and it stays in your browser. Clearing your browser data or switching devices resets the wizard. To move to a new device, use Download in the wizard to export your data to a file, then Upload it there; or simply re-enter your inputs. No account is needed either way.

The nine-step wizard takes about 20 minutes. Each step saves automatically as you progress, so you can pause and return at any time. You don't need all your information on hand. You can enter estimates and update them later.

Absolutely. RetireCiv is built for active federal employees planning ahead. The calculator projects your benefits at various retirement dates, helping you identify the optimal time to retire, close savings gaps, and take action while you still can.

The standard FERS annuity formula is:

If you retire at age 62 or older with 20+ years of service, the multiplier increases to 1.1%, a 10% bonus on every dollar of annuity.

Your High-3 is the average of your three highest consecutive years of base pay. It does not include overtime, bonuses, or allowances. For most employees this is their final three years of service, but it can occur earlier if you received a larger pay increase in a prior period.

Your Minimum Retirement Age (MRA) is the earliest age you can retire on an immediate annuity under the regular rules: unreduced with 30 years of service, reduced with 10 to 29 (MRA+10). It depends on your year of birth:

• Age 62 with 5+ years: Full, unreduced annuity.
• Age 60 with 20+ years: Full, unreduced annuity.
• MRA with 30+ years: Full, unreduced annuity.
• MRA with 10–29 years: Reduced 5% per year under age 62 (MRA+10). You may postpone to avoid the reduction.
• VERA (Early Retirement): Age 50 with 20 years, or any age with 25 years, when OPM authorizes a VERA window.
• DSR (Discontinued Service Retirement): Same age and service tracks as VERA, for an involuntary separation such as a reduction in force (RIF).

Yes. Under FERS, unused sick leave is converted to additional service credit at retirement. Every 174 hours of sick leave equals one month of service. OPM turns leftover hours into days, adds them to the leftover days of your service, and counts whole months only, dropping any days that remain. This credit is added to your years of service for the annuity calculation, but it does not count toward retirement eligibility (e.g., it won't push you past the 30-year threshold to retire). One exception on the computation side: if you retire at 62 or later, sick leave can push you past the 20 years needed for the higher 1.1% multiplier (OPM Benefits Administration Letter 18-103). If you leave federal service before retiring and later draw a deferred annuity, you forfeit the balance and get no credit.

The SRS is a bridge payment for FERS retirees who retire before age 62 and are not yet eligible for Social Security. It approximates the Social Security benefit you earned under FERS, calculated as: Estimated SS benefit at 62 × (civilian FERS years / 40), with the years rounded to the nearest whole year. Bought-back military service and CSRS-component years count toward your pension but not toward the SRS fraction. The SRS is subject to the Social Security earnings test. Retiring under the special provisions themselves (5 U.S.C. §8412(d)) exempts you from the test until your Minimum Retirement Age; a LEO, firefighter, or controller who separates under VERA or DSR instead is subject to the test. The SRS ends automatically when you turn 62.

• The government automatically contributes 1% of your basic pay to your TSP whether or not you contribute.
• For the next 3% you contribute, the government matches dollar-for-dollar.
• For the next 2% you contribute, the government matches $0.50 per dollar.
• The match itself tops out at 4% of pay; with the automatic 1%, total agency contributions reach 5% (your 5% + 5% agency = 10% total).
• You must be enrolled to receive matching. The 1% automatic contribution vests after 3 years; matching contributions vest immediately.

Roth TSP catch-up contributions are required for participants whose prior-year Social Security wages exceed $150,000 (2026), per SECURE 2.0 Act.

Traditional TSP contributions are pre-tax: they reduce your taxable income today, but withdrawals in retirement are taxed as ordinary income.

Roth TSP contributions are after-tax: you pay taxes now, but qualified withdrawals in retirement are completely tax-free, including all earnings.

Many federal employees use a blend of both to diversify tax exposure in retirement. The election can be changed at any time through myPay.

RetireCiv compounds your current TSP balance and ongoing contributions forward to your projected retirement date using the weighted historical return of your fund allocation. The model accounts for your contribution rate, agency matching, and age-based catch-up contributions. Default return assumptions by fund are disclosed on the Assumptions page.

You can claim as early as age 62 (with a permanent reduction of up to ~30%), at your Full Retirement Age (FRA), age 66–67 depending on birth year, for full benefits, or as late as age 70 to earn delayed credits of 8% per year beyond FRA. Your Social Security estimate is free in the calculator. The full plan adds a claiming-age analysis with a break-even calculator that shows the age at which delayed claiming overtakes claiming early.

FERS is fully covered by Social Security, so the Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP) never applied to FERS service. WEP historically reduced Social Security only for people with a pension from work not covered by Social Security, mainly older CSRS employees. Either way, the Social Security Fairness Act (P.L. 118-273), signed in January 2025, repealed both WEP and the Government Pension Offset (GPO) retroactively to benefits payable for January 2024. Affected retirees received retroactive payments from SSA.

The SRS bridges the gap for FERS employees who retire before age 62. It is subject to the Social Security earnings test: in 2026, if you earn more than $24,480 from wages or self-employment after retirement, your SRS is reduced $1 for every $2 above that limit. Retiring under the special provisions themselves (5 U.S.C. §8412(d)) exempts you until your Minimum Retirement Age; a LEO, firefighter, or controller who separates under VERA or DSR is subject to the test. The SRS ends at age 62 when you become eligible for actual Social Security benefits.

Yes. FERS was designed to integrate with Social Security. Federal employees under FERS pay full Social Security (OASDI) taxes on their federal pay and are fully covered. CSRS employees do not pay Social Security taxes on federal wages and generally are not covered, though prior private-sector work may have generated a partial SS benefit.

The Readiness Score is a 0–100 composite score that measures how prepared you are for retirement across five financial dimensions: income replacement, savings rate, financial independence progress, debt health, and emergency fund coverage. A score of 80+ is rated “Excellent.” The score updates dynamically as you modify your inputs.

• Income Replacement (30 pts): Your projected retirement income (FERS + TSP + SS) as a percentage of your current household salary (yours plus your spouse's, while it is still being paid). Full points at 100% replacement; 80%+ is the common planning target.
• Savings Rate (20 pts): Your total annual savings (TSP contributions plus any other investments) as a percentage of your household salary. Target: 20%+ per year.
• Financial Independence Progress (20 pts): Your investment assets, with home value excluded, as a percentage of your FI number (25× your annual expenses, including your debt payments, so paying off a loan lowers the number). Target: 100% of your FI number.
• Debt Health (15 pts): Your annual debt payments as a percentage of your household salary. Points scale down from full at 0% to zero at a 36% debt-to-income ratio.
• Emergency Fund (15 pts): Months of living expenses covered by liquid assets. Target: 6+ months of coverage.

Yes. Calculating and viewing your Readiness Score is free and does not require an account. Scenario comparisons, Monte Carlo projections, and the full Action Plan are included in the paid plan.

RetireCiv uses official OPM, SSA, and TSP formulas with annually updated data. How close an estimate lands depends on how closely your inputs match your official records: your service dates, your High-3 salary and your leave balances.

Income figures are gross (before taxes) by default. You can turn on an optional taxes and deductions estimate in the Benefits step. It applies federal tax brackets, the Social Security taxation formula, an approximate state tax rate for your state (applying its modeled retirement-income exclusion where it has one), and your FEHB, FEGLI, dental and vision premiums, plus Medicare Part B premiums from age 65. A gross/net toggle then appears on the dashboard and the Monte Carlo simulation, and the PDF report adds an after-tax section. If taxes and premiums exceed your income in a phase, the net figure shows $0 and the shortfall is stated beside it. In the Monte Carlo net view, success means that, after tax, your income covers your spending in every simulated year. The estimate is for planning only and is not tax advice.

Monte Carlo simulation runs thousands of randomized market scenarios against your retirement plan to measure the share of simulated futures in which your income covers your spending in every simulated year, through your projected retirement horizon. A single average-return projection can hide sequence-of-returns risk, which Monte Carlo surfaces. RetireCiv runs 10,000 simulations per analysis by default, with 1,000 and 50,000 available on the page. Learn more on the Monte Carlo page.

Your retirement inputs are stored locally in your browser (via localStorage). Your retirement data stays in your browser unless you explicitly export it, and it is never transmitted to RetireCiv servers. Our servers hold only your account: your email address, your first name, your subscription status and your sign-in session, managed by Supabase (sign-in) and Stripe (billing).

Yes. Your retirement data lives only in your browser, so clearing your browser's site data for retireciv.com, or using the app's built-in reset, removes it immediately. There is nothing to delete on our side because we never stored it.

Yes. Email us from the address on your account with the subject line "Delete Account" (the contact page has the details) and we permanently delete your account and its data. Billing records are retained by our payment processor (Stripe) as required for financial compliance. We never store raw card numbers.

No. We do not sell, rent, or share your personal retirement data with third parties for marketing purposes. Since your retirement data stays in your browser, we literally cannot, nor would we. See our Privacy Policy for full details.

Payments are handled by Stripe. RetireCiv never sees or stores your card number.

• Free, with no account:

  • FERS annuity calculator
  • Retirement readiness score
  • 9-step setup wizard
  • TSP growth projections
  • Social Security estimates
• The full plan adds:

  • Full PDF retirement report
  • Personalized action plan
  • Monte Carlo simulation (10,000 runs by default)
  • Compare retirement dates
  • Mortgage payoff analyzer
  • Spouse / household planning

$49.95 a year, billed once a year. There is one plan and one price. See what it includes.

Yes. There is a 14-day refund on your first purchase: write to support@retireciv.com within 14 days of the charge. The Terms of Service have the full policy.

Yes. You can cancel your paid subscription from your account settings at any time. Your paid features remain active through the end of your current billing period.