Planning for retirement can be scary. After all, most people only do it once so everyone is a newbee.
However, retirement planning doesn’t have to be complicated and knowing what your FERS Pension will be a great first step.
And fortunately, the calculation is really simple.
Easy FERS Pension Calculation
This guide will be your quick and easy guide to get an estimate of your FERS pension. If you want a more in depth guide then you’ll want to check out the full guide/calculator here.
All you need to know to calculate your FERS pension is how many years of service you have and your high-3 salary.
Your high-3 salary is your average annual salary during the 3 highest paid years of your career (normally the last 3). So if your last three years you were paid 95k, 100k, then 105k, then your high-3 would be 100k (the average).
And for planning purposes, a rough guess for your high-3 salary is plenty.
So if you are more than 3 years away from retirement, just use your current salary as your proxy for your high-3.
Easy FERS Pension Calculation Examples
So let’s say you have 25 years of service and your high-3 is 100k, your annual pension would be:
25 X $100,000 X 1% = $25,000 Gross Annual Pension
As you can see, (most federal employees) get 1% of their high-3 salary for every year of service they have.
However, there is one exception to this rule. If you retire at age 62 or later with 20+ years of service then you get 1.1% of your high-3 for every year of service (10% raise!)
So if you met that criteria then with the same numbers as the above example your pension would now be:
25 X $100,000 X 1.1% = $27,500 Gross Annual Pension.
Do This Now!
So if you haven’t already, do the math for your numbers now! Yes, I mean right now 🙂
This is the first step in knowing what your retirement is going to look like and even a rough estimate is way better than nothing
It’s Simple, But…
As you can see, the pension equation is quite simple. Just easy multiplication.
However, the fun part is knowing what is going to come out of your pension before you ever see it. So if you want the full course meal, this full article walks you through how to calculate your net pension (aka, what will actually hit your bank account every month).
