GAO has estimated that federal agencies spent $6.7 billion last year in paid leave for employees who accepted deferred resignation offers, although cautioning that “OPM does not know the actual costs of the paid administrative leave used for workforce reduction efforts, including the deferred resignation program.”

A report shows a total of $9.5 billion in administrative leave costs in 2025—other uses accounted for the other $2.8 billion—up from $1.5 billion in 2023 and $1.7 billion in 2024.

About 140,000 employees accepted deferred resignation under either a government-wide offer that started early last year or in later agency-specific offers. With a general required separation date of last September 30—the deadline was extended in some cases so that employees could qualify for immediate retirement—some were on paid leave for six months or more.

The GAO found that some 126,000 employees were on paid leave for at least two months and nearly 100,000 for at least three months. OPM late last year generally limited new deferred resignation periods to 12 weeks.

The GAO said that precise costs are uncertain because in some cases agencies mixed deferred resignation leave with other types of administrative leave and with pay for holidays. “OPM has issued guidance to help address this data issue” but “does not plan to retroactively fix such historical errors in data released to the public,” it said.

“To calculate the long-term government-wide savings of workforce reduction efforts, OPM needs to know the short-term costs of using paid administrative leave. However, OPM cannot easily and accurately do this because it did not create a separate paid administrative leave category in the payroll data system to use when reporting these specific paid leave hours to OPM,” it said.

Until last year, administrative leave typically was used for paid absences of only individual days or even hours for purposes deemed to be in the agency’s interest such as attending health insurance fairs, outside career development training and the like. OPM in June proposed rules, not yet finalized, to formalize use of administrative leave for workforce reduction among other specified purposes including in settlement agreements with employees who otherwise would face firing on performance or conduct grounds.

The GAO estimate also does not include the value to employees—and the cost to the government—of continued benefits such as health and life insurance and the buildup of retirement benefits as employees were away from work but in paid status.

OPM agreed with recommendations to publicly disclose data reliability issues in the paid administrative leave data it releases, and create a new category in record systems to specify when administrative leave is used for workforce reduction.

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