Pre-Retirement

Phased Retirement will encourage the most experienced Federal employees to extend their contributions to the Nation, and will operate as a tool to ensure continuity of operations and to facilitate knowledge management. The main purpose of Phased Retirements is to enhance mentoring and training of the employees who will be filling the positions of more experienced employees who are preparing for full retirement.  It is intended to encourage experienced employees to remain, in at least a part-time capacity, until less experienced employees are fully equipped to fulfill the same duties and responsibilities as those employees who wish to retire.

 An effective Phased Retirement plan has been a long-sought goal.  However, under prior law, the problem was that an individual who was retirement eligible but wished to continue employment on a part-time basis generally had little economic incentive to do so because an employee’s potential retirement benefits would often be equal to or greater than their salary would be for part-time employment.

Phased Retirement will in essence permit an individual to retire from part of their employment, while continuing the remainder and continuing to earn additional retirement benefits proportionately based upon the additional less-than-full-time employment.