Federal retirement benefits

What it means

Federal civilian employees are covered by the Federal Employees Retirement System, or by the older Civil Service Retirement System if they were hired long enough ago. Both can pay a survivor annuity.

Federal Employees' Group Life Insurance is a separate benefit with a separate beneficiary form, and the Thrift Savings Plan is a third.

Claims are handled by the Office of Personnel Management, and each benefit has its own form and its own timetable.

Why it matters

A federal family frequently holds three or four separate benefits, each with its own beneficiary record, and assumes one form covers them all. It does not.

Survivor annuity elections made at retirement are usually irrevocable, so what a widow or widower receives can turn on a form signed decades earlier.

When you are likely to meet it

• When a federal employee or retiree dies.
• When reviewing which federal benefits name whom.
• When a survivor annuity is being claimed.

Related terms

• Beneficiary designationA named person on an account or policy who receives it directly on death, without it passing through the will or probate.
• DD Form 214The discharge document proving military service. Almost every veterans' benefit after a death depends on producing it.
• Group life insuranceLife insurance provided through an employer, union or association rather than bought individually.
• Pension Benefit Guaranty CorporationThe federal agency that pays pensions when the employer's plan has failed — and holds pensions nobody claimed.
• Railroad retirement benefitsA separate federal retirement and survivor system for railroad workers, run by its own board rather than by Social Security.
• Survivor annuityA continuing pension payment to a surviving spouse, if that option was chosen when the pension started.
• Survivor benefitA continuing payment to a spouse, child or other dependant after somebody dies — from Social Security, a pension, or an annuity.
• Thrift Savings PlanThe retirement savings plan for federal employees and members of the uniformed services.

Official sources

The authority this page describes, at the agency that publishes it. Sahvelo does not restate a rule from a secondary source.

• OPM — reporting the death of a federal annuitant (opens in a new tab)

Sahvelo guidance that uses this

• Federal and railroad benefits
• Pensions