Your payability date is generally the date on which you become eligible to receive a retirement allowance. If you are eligible for immediate payment of a retirement allowance, your payability date would be the same as your effective retirement date. However, if the receipt of your retirement allowance is deferred, your payability date would be either a) the date that you are eligible to begin receiving retirement allowance payments, or b) a subsequent date that you designate for payments to begin.

You may generally file your retirement application no sooner than 90 days before your effective retirement date, and TRS must receive your application no later than 1 day before your effective retirement. However, if you are a Tier I or Tier II member who wants to retire under a deferred payability, it would be in your best interest to file your retirement application as soon as you leave service. Your initial payability date will be deferred until the date you would have received 25 years of service credit had you remained in service. Once TRS receives your retirement application, we will begin counting towards the 25-year service credit date. For example, a 62-year-old member leaves service after acquiring 20 years of service credit. Five more years must elapse before the member can begin receiving deferred retirement payments, but TRS does not begin counting down those five years until we receive that member's retirement application. If the member were to wait five years and then file an application, five additional years would have to elapse before the member can receive deferred retirement payments.