How To Calculate Sick Days To Burn

Ever hear a Fersonian near retirement say something like, “I have 12 days of sick leave to burn”? What are they talking about? They may have 1,500 hours of sick leave—how do they get to a number of 12 to burn? And what does it mean you need to burn them or you lose them?

Well, we’re going to answer all of that in the next few minutes. As well as help you avoid the most common error in this calculation. Let’s go.

Before we start, though, let me be clear on what this article is NOT. It is not a detailed article on sick leave, how it is credited and all the nitty gritty details. For that background, you can see my other article on sick leave HERE.

What we are doing in this particular article is showing exactly how to calculate the number of sick leave hours a retiree can burn and not do damage to your annuity calculation. If you don’t understand that sentence, then you need to go read the other article first.

CALCULATING OVERALL SERVICE TIME CREDIT

Let’s walk through an example that will illustrate this in plain English. This is a similar example I share in my retirement seminars. So if you’ve been to one of those, this will look familiar.

We’ll use our old friend Jeff Fersonian as an example. He won’t mind. He’s busy fly fishing for bonefish and permit down in the Bahamas right now. Let’s say that Jeff has the following data related to his career:

• Hired as a FERS employee on June 15, 1998, retiring on December 31, 2024

• Bought back 4 years, 3 months and 23 days of active duty military time

• Currently has 800 hours of sick leave as of last period (PP 16 of 2024 that ended August 24, 2024). This is super important so make sure you get out your LES and a pay period calendar. I’m using NFC’s calendar for 2024. Your agency may have a different payroll processor.

Step One

Determine how many years, months and days of FERS time Jeff has. Easy peasy. Go to Time and Date.com calculator and enter June 15, 1998 for the start date, December 31st, 2024 for the end date. When you do that, you should get:

25 years, 6 months and 17 days (including the last day, 12/31/24).

Set that number aside.

Step Two

Determine how many years, months and days of military time Jeff bought back. (Some of you won’t have this step, so skip it). You can find this in your eOPF (Electronic Official Personnel Folder). It should be in there somewhere. Some DD-214’s, maybe some receipts from DFAS, whatever. Should be some documentation showing how much you purchased back before coming on the government. In our case, Jeff looked and saw a receipt showing paid in full for:

4 years, 3 months, and 23 days

Set that number aside

Step Three

(This is where most people make their mistake).

We need to find Jeff’s total number of sick leave hours AT THE POINT OF RETIREMENT. How do we do that exactly? Well, we know at the end of PP 16, Jeff had 800 hours of sick leave. We also know that we all accrue 4 hours of sick leave per pay period, right? So how many more hours of sick leave will Jeff accrue?

We look at his retirement date of 12/31/24 and see that he is retiring in the middle of PP 26 of 2024. You don’t accrue the 4 hours of sick leave if you retire in the middle of a pay period. (AND WHO CARES?! STOP WORRYING ABOUT THAT, PEOPLE!). So Jeff gets no credit for PP 26 for sick leave purposes. That leaves Pay Periods 17 through 25 that he will accrue 4 hours each. That’s 9 more pay periods Jeff is going to work. 9 pay periods times 4 hours a pay period equals 36 more hours of sick leave that Jeff will accrue.

He currently has 800 hours at the end of PP 16. He’s going to earn 36 more hours so Jeff will have 836 hours of sick leave when he retires.

Now, we go to the sick leave chart and see how much service time that equates to. 836 hours falls right between 4 months, 24 days and 4 months, 25 days on the chart. The instructions say if this happens you round up, not down. So for our purposes, Jeff has:

0 years, 4 months, and 25 days of service credit for sick time.

Step Four

Putting the whole thing together.

If we list all of the time Jeff’s earned in each of the 3 steps (categories) above, we get:

25 years 6 months 17 days (FERS WORKING TIME)

4 years 3 months 23 days (MILITARY BUYBACK)

0 years 4 months 25 days (SICK TIME)

Add that up. Trick: for OPM purposes, every month has 30 days in it.

If we add up the days, we get 65 days. Since each 30 day period is worth a month, that means we have 2 months and 5 days, right? (65 divided by 30 = 2 months and 5 days left over).

Add up the months. That’s 15 months total, including the 2 from the days column. (6+3+4+2). That is equal to 1 year and 3 months.

Add up the years. We have 30 years, including the 1 year from the months column (25+4+1).

So….grand total?

30 years, 3 months and 5 days.

Step Five

30 years, 3 months and 5 days = 30 years and 3 months. Remember-OPM pays you for whole months but not partial months. In this case, Jeff has 5 days he’s not going to get paid for. He can do several things:

1. Do nothing. This is the easiest thing to do. He can just retire and lose those 5 days. He gets no credit for it and that’s it.

2. He can retire 5 days earlier. He can retire on 12/26/24 and still receive the same credit: 30 years and 3 months. Since that’s all he’s getting credit for anyway. (Actually, this is going to be a big problem in Jeff’s scenario because that would put Jeff in an earlier pay period —PP 25 instead of PP 26— that would reduce his sick leave hours he will accrue, so technically this is going to cost him in this scenario…and why most people won’t do this. So this is probably a bad example, but I’ll leave it in here to illustrate the miscalculation it would cause. You may be able to do this in your particular scenario depending on whether you would be retiring in the same pay period as initially calculated.)

3. He can do what most people do: Keep his retirement date of 12/31/24 and burn the equivalent of 5 days of sick leave since he’s not getting credit for it anyway.

CAREFUL THOUGH!!…

Because the government cannot make anything simple, we have to be careful on how exactly Jeff takes his 5 days of sick leave. For all of us, we think 5 days = 40 hours. Therefore, Jeff can burn 40 hours of sick leave and be fine. THAT IS NOT CORRECT!!!!!!!! DON’T DO THAT!!!!!

When sick leave is calculated for retirement, there are not 8 hours in a day, there are 5.79 or 5.8 hours in a day. (Yeah, I know—super confusing and unnecessarily complicated!) So how many hours exactly is 5 days? Best thing to do is go back to the sick leave chart. And start thinking in hours, rather than days. (See the picture below).

When we go to the sick leave chart, we see that 5 days = 29 hours. Jeff has 29 hours to burn. That’s it. If he burns more than that, he’ll eat in to the next month and instead of retiring with 30 years and 3 months, he’ll retire with 30 years and 2 months.

MOST COMMON MISTAKE BY FAR

Most people I know look at the sick leave chart in a vacuum. They isolate the sick leave hours and just look at that and nothing else. Let’s say we did that in Jeff’s case. We see that Jeff would have 836 hours at retirement. We look on the chart and see that 836 hours = 4 months and 25 days. They then tell me, “I have 25 days of sick time to burn” NO!!!!!! What happens if you burn 25 days in this example? You’ll eat into your 3 months. You’ve burned too many. Because you aren’t doing the calculations the same way OPM will do them.

YOU CANNOT LOOK AT THE SICK LEAVE BALANCE ALONE!

You must first add up FERS working time, military time AND sick time. Then, and only then, can you determine how much time to burn.

You may think Jeff has 25 days of sick time to burn. He doesn’t. He only has 5. Big difference.

GOOD NEWS

If you are an agency that uses FedHR Navigator as your retirement estimate report, they now include a paragraph on page one that does all of this calculation for you. You don’t have to do it anymore.

SUMMARY

1. Find your TOTAL time including FERS time, military time, and sick time. (Remember to estimate your future accrued sick time at 4 hours per future pay period you plan on working)

2. Add the years, months, and days together

3. Partial months do not receive credit. You can burn your partial months and not hurt your annuity calculation. (Check the sick leave chart and think in hours rather than days).

Author’s Note:

Let’s get real for a second. Is sick leave going to really matter that much? For most of you, no. It’s not that big of a number. I mean, think about it. If you have an entire YEAR of sick leave built up—like an entire YEAR—it’s only adding 1% to your high-three. And that’s an entire year! So if you don’t take any sick time at all for 20 years, the most you can add to your annuity is 1% of your high-three. And most of you will have far less than that.

Is it worth worrying over a single month, one way or the other? In my opinion, absolutely not. In fact, in my opinion, it’s impossible to make a mistake large enough for you to ever care about regarding sick leave. I’ve never met anyone that 10 years into retirement, they’re in the S&S Cafeteria line at 4:30 pm, lamenting the fact that they missed that one month of sick leave credit by a miscalculation of a day. You’ll NEVER think about sick leave again, regardless of the decisions you make concerning it.

But I know there are some of you out there who want to calculate everything out to the decimal point because you eat this stuff up. This article is for you. You’re welcome.