Micah Shilanski: Have you ever wondered what the maximum sick leave is you can carry into retirement?

Well, if you have and stay tuned for this FERS federal fact check.

Hi, I'm Micah Shianski, with Plan Your Federal Retirement.

Today, we have a great question from Wayne.

And he says, what is the maximum amount of unused annual leave that it may be a paid for when I retire.

Wayne, that is an absolutely fantastic question.

I want to answer that in two parts.

While you did say annual leave, I want to talk about the other leave that you have as well, which is sick leave, which is a secondary question I got as well.

So as we're talking about this, the amount of leave that you have that can be paid.

There's no quote, unquote cap that you have of so many, so much dollars that can be paid.

But there is an annual amount, a cap of how much you can carry forward.

As you know, you can only carry forward those 240 hours of annual leave into the next year.

Then you could build up an entire year's worth of leave, and you can get that cash out and paid again.

There's not that dollar cap that's there.

Now some people in a very unique situation are unable to use their leave because of their positions, and that can also be banked and cashed out as a lump sum as well.

It's a very rare situation.

If you fall into that, that's going to be there.

But let's talk about your sick leave.

What happens with that?

Great news is there's no cap on your sick leave either.

However much sick leave you have can continue to grow and build for you, but remember, you're not cashed out on sick leave.

That translates into increasing the amount of your pension into retirement.

We take your sick leave however many hours you have, you put it into this 20-87 chart.

It's going to tell you the years, months and days that you have for sick leave purposes, and that's going to be added to your pension calculation.

So for example, if I had one year and two months of sick leave and I had 30 years of service, the 30 years of service makes it eligible for me to retire with 30 years of eligibility boots on the ground time, the one year and two months of sick leave adds to my pension.

So my pension computation will be based on 31 years and two months, and that's how they would compute my pension for retirement.

If you have great questions about your benefits, like these, to make sure you're getting the most out of them, then make sure you submit them at plan-your-federal-retirement.com.

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Until the next time, happy planning.

I'm

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