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Buyback Leave – Postal Employees

Buyback Leave: Postal Employees

Buying back leave is a topic we want to discuss briefly because it can be incredibly important to both Federal and Postal employees. I think it is a very good topic to shed some additional light on. However, as always, everything that a Federal or Postal employee needs to know about their benefits can be found on the organization’s website or by contacting their Human Resource office, and buying back leave is not different (in the case of Postal employees – using LiteBlue and working with Shared Services).

That being said, it is our great pleasure to discuss buying back leave and how it can be used as ‘Gap’ money or how Annual Leave can be shared through the Postal ALS program. As a past Federal HR Executive, one of my key responsibilities was to make certain our customers understood their benefits and how they worked in the most crystallized manner possible. Let’s see if we can do that again about a topic that does not come up as much as the more popular topics such as the Thrift Savings Plan (TSP), The Federal Employees Health Benefits plan (FEHB), the Federal Employees Group Life Insurance plan (FEGLI). These subjects generally always get top-billing.

Let’s give Buying Back Leave top billing in this post. Buying Back Leave or what is commonly called Leave Buy-Back comes under the provisions of the Injury Compensation Program. When an employee is injured on the job they may be compelled to use their annual and sick leave while they are waiting for a decision from the Office of Workers’ Compensation Program (OWCP). When there is a traumatic injury employees are only permitted to buy back the leave they used after the end of the statutory 45-day continuation of pay period.

When an employee buys back annual leave for a prior year that exceeds the prescribed maximum, the leave over the maximum is automatically forfeited. Employees can only buy back the amount of leave that is eligible to be carried over. Often times an employee may lose leave when the time they are away from their duty station is changed to Leave Without Pay (LWOP) as a result of the leave buy-back. When this happens adjustments are made to rectify both the annual and sick leave.

I hope this explanation will make the situation of leave-buy back clear. If not, let us know and we will try again. There are a number of ways to make a great pot of soup.

P. S. Always Remember to Share What You Know

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