Changing agencies and breaks in service

Breaks in service are measured in days, and the number that matters is three. OPM defines a transfer as movement to another position without a break in service of one workday or more. Past that, you’ve separated and been rehired, whatever it felt like at the time.

Two separate rulebooks then land on the same threshold. For your leave clock, separations of one, two, or three calendar days are ignored and treated as a continuation of the earlier service.

Your insurance uses the same figure. FEHB and FEGLI continue without change when you move between payroll offices without a break of more than three days.

So a Friday-to-Monday move costs you nothing anywhere (Saturday and Sunday use up only two of the three days). A gap of a week starts moving dates and ending enrollments, and nobody sends you a summary of what changed.

On a clean transfer, nearly everything comes with you, and you do almost nothing. Both leave balances move to the new agency. Your health and life insurance continue without a new election, your TSP account is untouched, and your personnel file follows you.

The file is the part people forget. Your electronic Official Personnel Folder holds every SF-50 from every federal job you’ve held, and it travels between agencies rather than being rebuilt. It’s also where the evidence of your service history lives when a date turns out to be wrong.

A transfer isn’t a chance to shop. OPM is explicit that moving agencies is not an opportunity to elect new coverage. Your current plan carries over as it is, and you wait for Open Season or a qualifying life event to change it.

Moving into or out of a covered public-safety position is its own case, because the pension formula changes with it. Moving into or out of a covered position handles that separately.

A break pushes your service computation date forward by roughly the length of the gap, because the time you were gone isn’t federal service. That one date drives your leave accrual rate and other milestones, so moving it shows up in your paycheck rather than in a letter.

You also have more than one of these dates. OPM maintains four separate service computation dates: one each for leave, retirement, reduction in force, and the TSP. They often share a value, but they’re not the same thing.

The leave date is the one you can actually see. It sets whether you earn 4, 6, or 8 hours of annual leave a pay period, and it appears in block 31 of every SF-50 you receive. Block 30 on the same form carries your retirement coverage code.

Your retirement date isn’t printed there at all, since it runs under the CSRS and FERS Handbook rather than the leave rules. The two usually match, and when they don’t, the form shows the leave date while your pension depends on the other one.

On a transfer, both balances simply move with you. On a separation, they part company: annual leave is paid out in a lump sum and sick leave stays on your record, waiting to see whether you come back.

Sick leave is the more forgiving of the two. The balance remains to your credit when you separate, and it can be recredited when you’re reemployed, as long as it wasn’t already used to compute an annuity. OPM sets no deadline for coming back.

Annual leave is less forgiving, and returning quickly creates paperwork. If you’re reemployed before your lump-sum leave period runs out (the stretch of workdays the payout stands for), you refund the portion covering the overlap. The agency then recredits the matching hours to your balance. Restored annual leave is exempt from that refund.

The sick-leave balance is worth protecting for a second reason. At retirement, it converts into extra service credit, which sick and annual leave: converting hours to service credit covers in full.

Keep in mind that a break longer than three days ends your enrollments rather than pausing them. FEHB and FEGLI are tied to your employment, so a genuine separation terminates the coverage, and returning later means enrolling again as a new hire would.

Temporary Continuation of Coverage is the bridge across a gap. TCC lets you keep FEHB for up to 18 months after you separate, at the full cost: your share, the government's share, and a 2% administrative charge on top.

The reason to care mid-career is a rule that only bites decades later. Carrying FEHB into retirement requires five years of continuous coverage immediately before you retire, so a break in the wrong window can reset a clock you weren’t watching.

That rule has more moving parts than belong here, including how TCC and coverage as a family member count toward it. FEHB in retirement and the five-year rule covers it properly.

Most of what goes wrong in a move is a date that was entered once and never questioned. The checks below take an afternoon and are far easier now than during retirement counseling, when the records are decades old and the people who created them have moved on.

Before you go, get your own copy of the record:

After you land, read your first SF-50 at the new agency rather than filing it. Confirm the service computation date in block 31 matches what you expect, and confirm your health and life insurance transferred instead of quietly lapsing.

If your move includes a real gap rather than a transfer, one more decision waits. Taking a FERS refund covers what happens to the contributions you leave behind, and why cashing them out is the hardest choice here to reverse. To see where your service history leaves your overall plan, run your free readiness score.

• Your final leave and earnings statement. It shows both leave balances at the moment you walked out.
• Form SF-1150, the Record of Leave Data upon Separation or Transfer, which OPM advises every separating employee to request.
• Your retirement service computation date from HR, in writing.
• Copies of your SF-50s, pulled from your eOPF while you still have access to it.