Updated August 2, 2026. Quick answer: electing the full FERS survivor annuity costs 10% of your own annuity for life and pays your spouse 50% of it after you die. The partial election costs 5% and pays 25%. Those are the only two sizes, and the arithmetic is not the reason to choose — FEHB is.
The two elections, priced
OPM prices it in one line: “The reduction is 10 percent of the base selected”, with its own example — on a $9,000 annuity, the full election costs $900 a year and the half election costs $450, because the same 10% is applied to only half the annuity.
On a more typical modern number — a $90,000 high-3 with 30 years, an annuity of $27,000 — the full election costs $2,700 a year and leaves a surviving spouse $13,500 a year. The calculator will do it on your own figures, both ways.
Why the money is the smaller half of the decision
A surviving spouse keeps FEHB coverage only if they are receiving a survivor annuity. Decline the election to keep the full annuity, and the health insurance ends with you. That is why the comparison people reach for — buy life insurance instead, it is cheaper per dollar of death benefit — usually fails: a term policy does not carry a group health plan with it, and no private policy can replace one.
Two further asymmetries push the same way. The survivor annuity is indexed, so it holds its value across a widowhood that may run decades. And it does not run out, which a lump sum invested at an assumed rate might.
When declining is defensible
It genuinely can be. If your spouse has their own federal annuity and their own FEHB enrollment, the coverage argument disappears and the question really is just arithmetic. If your spouse is significantly older, or in poor health, the expected payout period shortens against a cost you pay from day one. And in a marriage where both incomes are strong and independent, 10% for life is a real price.
What is not a good reason is optimism about who dies first. The election is priced as insurance because that is what it is, and the case for insurance was never that the bad outcome is likely.
The election requires your spouse’s agreement to anything less than the full benefit, which is the same protective logic private pensions use — how spousal consent works on the private-sector side, and the same decision in a corporate pension, where the pricing is set by an insurer rather than by statute.
What it does not affect
The survivor election reduces the annuity only. It does nothing to the TSP, which passes by beneficiary designation on its own terms — and a beneficiary form nobody has looked at since the 1990s overrides your will. What a beneficiary actually inherits is a separate rulebook worth reading before you assume.
The 50% and 25% survivor amounts from 5 U.S.C. § 8442(a)(1); the 10% reduction from 5 U.S.C. § 8419(a)(1); the worked example from the OPM CSRS and FERS Handbook, Chapter 50. Read August 2026. General information, not advice.
If the pension is a military one: retired pay is 2.5% or 2.0% a year of your high-3, and Guard service divides points by 360 — and the survivor election has a statutory price rather than an insurer’s: what SBP costs and what it buys.
The alternative sometimes proposed here is to decline the survivor annuity and insure the gap privately instead. The conditions that have to hold for that to work are specific, and the FERS election also carries a consequence a policy cannot replace: the survivor annuity is what keeps the health coverage.