What the Timeline Shows — and How It’s Built
Every event on your timeline comes from three verifiable sources. Step increases use the current pay tables for your craft (APWU September 19, 2026; NALC March 7, 2026; NPMHU September 6, 2025) and the contractual waiting periods: APWU Grades 4–7 use 36 weeks and Grades 8–11 use 30 weeks. NALC Table 2 uses 46 weeks and NPMHU Table 2 uses 48 weeks; legacy NALC and NPMHU schedules use the waiting period for each individual step transition. If you enter your actual next step date from LiteBlue, every later step chains from it; if you leave it blank, the timeline assumes you’re midway through your current waiting period. Retirement gates come from the FERS eligibility rules — your MRA from the statutory birth-year table, then MRA+30, age 60 with 20 years, and age 62, with the 1.1% multiplier applied at 62 if you’ll have 20 or more years. TSP milestones compound your balance and biweekly contributions at your assumed return.
How to Read the Annuity Estimates
Each retirement gate shows an estimated annual annuity using the standard FERS formula: high-3 salary × years of service × multiplier. The timeline approximates your future high-3 as the average of your projected salary over the 36 months before each date — driven by your remaining step increases plus the pay-growth assumption you set. The default 2% growth is deliberately modest; recent years have seen larger combined COLA and general wage increases, but future contracts aren’t guaranteed. Gates reached before 62 on an unreduced path (MRA+30 or 60+20) are flagged for the FERS Special Retirement Supplement, and the MRA+10 early-out option shows its 5%-per-year penalty to help compare an early-retirement estimate.
What It Deliberately Leaves Out
Two things can move your real dates and amounts, and both work in your favor: military service buyback can add years to your service computation date, and unused sick leave converts to service credit at retirement (2,087 hours = one full year). Neither is projected here because both depend on choices and balances only you know — treat the timeline’s annuity figures as a floor if you have either. Step projections cover career clerks, city carriers, and mail handlers — the crafts with contractual step tables. EAS employees, managers, and rural carriers can use the salary-entry mode: there’s no step schedule to project (EAS pay is banded and rural pay follows evaluated routes), but every retirement gate, annuity estimate, and TSP milestone works the same. This career timeline does not model noncareer step schedules before conversion to career — the salary-entry mode works in the meantime. CCAs, PSEs and MHAs may have their own noncareer step provisions.
Sanity-Check Your Dates
Your official next step date lives on LiteBlue and your service computation date is on your PS Form 50 — both are worth pulling before you make plans around this timeline. For deeper dives on any gate the timeline shows you, the FERS calculator models survivor benefit elections, the TSP dashboard lets you test allocations, and the step increase guide covers what can delay a step. Estimates are for planning only; OPM adjudicates the real numbers.
Step-progression sources: APWU Article 9.2, NALC chart, NPMHU chart. Method corrected September 21, 2026.