Your first benefits enrollment as a new hire

Nearly all of it, and the clock is short. Health, dental, vision, and optional life insurance each give you 60 days from the day you become eligible, and nothing renews those windows early.

Missing one is rarely fatal, but it costs you time. For health, dental, and vision, you generally wait for the annual Open Season, which means living most of a year with the choice you didn’t make.

Two things run on different clocks entirely. Basic life insurance starts automatically and has to be actively refused within your first pay period, and your Thrift Savings Plan (TSP) contributions also start on their own.

One more deadline sits at about 90 days, and it only matters if you want to undo the automatic TSP enrollment. That clock starts with your first automatic contribution (not your first day), and the timeline below shows all three.

Two do, and knowing which is the single most useful thing on this page. Everything else sits and waits for you, and then closes.

Basic life insurance under the Federal Employees Group Life Insurance (FEGLI) program starts on your first day in a pay and duty status. You don’t sign up for it. If you don’t want it, you must waive it before the end of your first pay period, and the premium comes out of your pay until you do.

The TSP is the other. Your agency enrolls you and begins deducting from your pay automatically, and that default is deliberately set to capture the agency match rather than to be minimal.

Everything else requires you to act: health, dental, vision, optional life insurance, and a flexible spending account. None of them enroll you by default, and none of them chase you.

They all run 60 days, but they don’t behave identically, and the dental and vision detail is easy to miss.

Health coverage under FEHB gives newly eligible employees 60 days to enroll. This is also the moment a much longer clock starts: carrying FEHB into retirement requires five years of continuous enrollment before you separate, which the FEHB in retirement lesson covers. Enrolling now is what makes that possible decades later.

Dental and vision under FEDVIP each get their own 60-day window. You can enroll in dental on day 30 and vision on day 59, and both are fine. The catch is that enrolling in one type ends that type's window, so you can’t change a day-30 dental enrollment on day 45.

FEDVIP has no five-year rule, which makes it structurally different from health and life insurance. The FEDVIP lesson covers why that matters much later.

Two separate decisions, on two different clocks, and only one of them happens by default.

Basic coverage is automatic from your first day in a pay and duty status, so your decision is whether to keep it. To waive it, you must act before the end of your first pay period, and the premium comes out of your pay in the meantime.

Optional coverage is the opposite. None of it is automatic, and you have 60 days from your entry date to elect any of it. In simple terms, doing nothing leaves you with Basic and nothing more.

The asymmetry matters because the optional election is the harder one to revisit. FEGLI doesn’t run a regular annual Open Season the way health and dental do, so a missed optional election isn’t simply a one-year wait. If you’re unsure, this is the window worth spending time on.

Contributions, most likely, before you’ve logged in once. Your agency enrolls you automatically and begins deducting from your basic pay.

The default rate is 5% of basic pay for participants who began or rejoined federal service on or after October 1, 2020. Those who started between August 2010 and September 2020 were enrolled at 3% instead, so a colleague hired earlier may be on a lower default without realizing it.

That 5% figure isn’t arbitrary. It’s exactly the contribution level that captures the full agency match (the money your agency adds on top of your own), so a new hire who changes nothing is already getting every matched dollar available. The 5% match lesson covers how the match is structured and what dropping below 5% costs.

You can elect not to contribute before the deductions begin, but the election has to be made by the end of your first pay period, subject to your agency's processing time. After that, you have 90 days from your first contribution to request a refund of your automatic contributions and their earnings, through My Account or the ThriftLine. Both give up match along with the contributions.

Work backward from the two deadlines that arrive first. Your first pay period governs the FEGLI Basic waiver, and day 60 governs almost everything else.

Handle the automatic items first, because they’re already running. Decide whether to keep Basic life insurance, and check what your TSP contribution is actually set to rather than assuming.

Then work through the opt-in list while the window is open: health, dental, vision, and optional life insurance. The dental and vision windows are separate, so a decision on one doesn’t force the other.

Finally, file your beneficiary designations. They have no deadline, which is exactly why they get forgotten, and they override your will. The beneficiary designations lesson covers the four separate forms. To see how these choices feed a longer plan, run your free readiness score.