When OPM pays your annuity, and what the deposit says

Your annuity is paid monthly, and it is paid in arrears. OPM states the rule plainly: your retirement annuity is paid each month and covers the period for the previous month, usually on the first business day of the month. The deposit that lands on June 1 is your May annuity.

That word "usually" is doing real work. When the first falls on a weekend or a federal holiday, the payment moves to the next business day. It does not arrive early. Your own bank adds a second variable, since institutions differ in how quickly they post an incoming ACH deposit once Treasury releases it.

Nothing about the schedule shifts through the year. Twelve payments, each covering the month before it, and no thirteenth. Which month your first payment covers depends on the retirement date you pick, which is one more thing that date decides.

It is a federal payment, described the way Treasury describes all of them. The Bureau of the Fiscal Service sends government payments over the ACH network with the paying agency in one field and the purpose of the payment in another. Their own worked example is a tax refund, which arrives as IRS TREAS 310 with a description of TAX REF.

Your annuity follows the same shape. The agency portion identifies OPM as the payer, and TREAS 310 marks it as a Treasury-disbursed federal payment. The trailing description names the payment type, Civil Service retirement, which is what separates it from a refund or a benefit paid by another agency.

The string is not an error code. It does not signal that your case is unresolved, and it does not mean the amount is provisional. Every annuitant on direct deposit sees some version of it every month.

New retirees often find the schedule working exactly as described while the amount looks wrong. That is usually interim pay rather than a payment error. OPM sends a partial, estimated amount on the normal monthly cycle until it finishes reviewing your case, then issues an adjustment to catch up the difference. Your final paycheck and leave payout come from your agency instead, on their own schedule, so those land independently of anything OPM does.

The timing and the mechanics of that stage are their own subject. Our lesson on OPM processing time and interim payments covers how long the review takes and roughly what share of your final amount to expect meanwhile. It also explains which pieces of your benefit are left out until your case is finalized.

OPM Retirement Services Online holds it. Signing in and choosing Verification of Annuity lets you pick a payment period and save or print the statement for that period. The same document doubles as proof of income when a lender or a landlord asks.

You will need your claim number to get in, the CSA or CSF number OPM assigned when your case was set up. It appears on the correspondence OPM sent at retirement. If you would rather have a statement mailed than downloaded, OPM will send one on request.

Check the calendar first. A payment that seems late on the first is often just a weekend, a federal holiday, or your bank posting a day behind, and it resolves without anyone doing anything.

If it is genuinely missing, OPM runs a dedicated process for it. You submit a missing payment report online with your claim number and the details of the payment, and OPM confirms by email that the report was received. It usually responds within three to five business days.

OPM asks that you not follow up while it researches. The form has one limit worth knowing in advance: missing refunds and missing lump sum payments cannot be reported through it, and have to go to OPM directly instead.