What’s your Service Computation Date?

* Trick Question – you actually have THREE Service Computation Dates (SCD’s).

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Executive Summary:

The first Service Computation Date is your SCD Civilian. This date is very straightforward- it is the day you walked in to your department’s HR branch and commenced employment as a federal employee. This date will stay the same unless you have a break in employment in the federal civil service.  SCD Civilian is used to calculate benefits such as your FERS life insurance payout formula, which is a gratis life insurance benefit (NOT FEGLI) provided to all FERS employees. I will cover this benefit in a future post.

The second Service Computation Date is the one you are used to seeing once every pay period in the upper right hand corner of your Leave and Earnings Statement (LES) if you work for the Department of Defense. This is SCD Leave, used to calculate your accrual of Annual Leave. Accrual rates for annual leave increase based on years of service calculated from SCD Leave.   If you are former active military NOT drawing retired pay from active duty, SCD Leave will be ‘back dated’ based on the years and months of service shown on your DD-214.   There are special cases where SCD Leave CAN ALSO be back dated for former active duty who ARE drawing retired pay, and I will cover these in a future post.

The third Service Computation Date is SCD RIF. This is the date you will be eligible for early retirement from the FERS system if you are offered an early retirement package like VERA (Voluntary Early Retirement Authority) for an agency-wide reduction or RIF (Reduction if Force) if your employing agency decides to cut your individual position. Under either of these, if you meet the time-in-service requirements you may retire early with full benefits (FEHB health care and a FERS immediate annuity). If you are a veteran who performed a FERS ‘military buyback’ credit for your active duty service, your SCD RIF and SCD Leave should match. It is critical that you verify these dates match after you make a ‘military buyback’ deposit.

(There is technically a FOURTH Service Computation Date, but you’ll have to splurge and sacrifice the cost of a vending machine snack to learn about it…. download Maximize Your Service Computation Date today!)

To check your three Service Computation Dates, log in to your HR Database (DCPDS for DoD employees) and look at your ‘My Biz’ tab. You will see a printout that looks like this:

Action Plan:

1. Make sure your SCD Civilian matches the day you commenced Federal Employment.
2. Make sure your SCD Leave rolls the calendar backward based on the years and months of credit shown in your DD-214 (if you are former active duty NOT drawing retired pay).
3. Make sure your SCD RIF matches SCD Leave if you bought back time. Else SCD RIF will match SCD Civilian.

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