OPM’s Retirement Services division must have its hands full right now. The Trump administration’s efforts to reduce the size of the federal workforce are really starting to show up in the OPM retirement backlog which grew by a total of 13,809 new retirement claims in November.

This surge in retirement claims is largely driven by the Deferred Resignation Program, which allowed federal employees to delay their official retirement dates while still receiving benefits, resulting in a wave of accumulated claims once the program concluded at the end of September 2025.

OPM Director Scott Kupor said in a recent interview that he expects about 300,000 federal employees to depart by the end of 2025, cutting the overall size of the federal workforce from about 2.4 million down to 2.1 million. He anticipated that 75-80% of these job cuts would come from the buyout offer under the Deferred Resignation Program.

Digital Claims from the Online Retirement Application

With the release of the November retirement figures, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has begun publishing new data which show a breakout of the digital retirement claims that are now coming in a result of the new Online Retirement Application (ORA) that launched over the summer.

When the ORA system was launched, OPM said that it would only accept digital retirement applications in the future, so as of July 15, 2025, OPM has only been accepting digital applications.

When the ORA launch was announced in a memo published in May, then acting director Charles Ezell wrote:

The federal workforce deserves a retirement process that matches the demands of the 21st century. Legacy systems, with outdated technology and cumbersome procedures, have delayed retirements and frustrated employees who have dedicated their careers to public service. By harnessing modern technology and inter-agency collaboration, OPM has been working to deliver a retirement process that is fast, user-friendly, and responsive to the needs of our employees.

According to the new data, OPM received 6,176 new digital claims in October and 7,833 in November. It processed 1,686 and 4,363 of those and did so in 45 and 38 days, respectively.

Most of the figures in the table below are from OPM’s latest retirement processing statistics from November 2025. I have added some of my own derived from OPM’s: the percentages processed as well as what I have referred to as “paper claims.” For the latter, these are the remainder of claims when digital are removed from the total.

The figures indicate that the shift towards digital retirement claims is happening pretty quickly thus far. The number of digital claims processed more than doubled from October to November. Also, the paper processing slowed significantly in November.

While the digital processing times were still over a month, the pace has picked up considerably, having been reduced by nearly 16% in just one month. 

The digital processing time is also markedly better than the total average processing time. OPM said that the processing times for paper claims are nearly 3 times longer than digital; it took 38 days on average in November to process digital claims versus 94 for paper.

On average thus far, OPM has received 7,005 digital retirement claims per month and processed 3,025.

Have you had experience with the new ORA system? If so, please share your experience in the comments below.

Total Inventory Pushes Record High

The total outstanding inventory of retirement claims has been high and grew even higher last month, going from 34,587 at the end of October to 48,396 at the end of November, a 40% increase.

October was an abnormally busy month as well. The total claims backlog saw a 46.9% increase over the end of September.

The sharp increase in incoming retirement claims over the last few months has pushed the total OPM retirement backlog to a level not seen since 2012. It topped 60,000 that year, so while it is not at an all time high, it is still a standout to be sure.

The table below shows how November compares to the past few years. None of the other years even comes close to 2025’s surge. Note: because OPM has started including the digital claims in its figures, I’ve used the overall totals for these figures.

January is normally the busiest month for OPM in terms of incoming retirement claims, so it will be interesting to see how December fares. If there is some reprieve in the incoming claims and OPM can get some of the backlog reduced, particularly if the pace of processing digital applications continues to increase, that will certainly help to manage what could be an even busier January than usual.

OPM Retirement Processing Status: November 2025

The latest unaltered retirement processing statistics from OPM are included below.

Retirement Services (RS) is working towards a fully digital retirement application process; RS is working with agencies and payroll offices to update legacy processes. During this period of transition, RS is still receiving many new retirement claims on paper.

• In November RS Received 23,393 new retirement claims; of these 7,833 were digital (33%) and 15,560 were paper (67%).
• The processing of digital cases is faster. With systematic checks of data, annuitants experience less delays due to missing information or incomplete packages.
• In November RS processed 8,707 new retirement claims; of these 4,363 were digital (50%) and 4,344 were paper (50%).
• In November digital cases were processed in 38 days, and paper claims were processed in 94 days

-Source here