The pension will be useless to you. The employee contribution for new employees is actually 4.4% and in return you get 1% of the average of highest 3-year salary times your years of service, starting at age 62. If you work until the minimum retirement age of 57, you can take a reduced pension and have health care benefits, but if you leave in ten years, you have to wait until 62 to start the annuity and don’t get health care. Once you’re on the pension, you get COLAs, but the value of your annuity will be eaten by inflation between when you leave at your planned max age 48 and when you can take the pension at 62. But you can roll your pension contributions into your TSP (like 401k) when you leave instead of deferring your annuity, to get that 4.4% back. I plan on doing this. You’ll be eligible for a 5% TSP contribution match that you get to keep after 3 years? of service.
The health care benefits aren’t that great, because while comprehensive, they are expensive...at least where I’m at and compared to my husbands benefits from a small (80 ish? employee) employer. YMMV. You can check out health care options in advance by opm.gov and using the plan comparison tool.
If your job is eligible for GS-14, it’s easy to move up to the next grade and steps. (I’m an attorney and we start at GS-11, with full grade potential of GS-14 for the non-supervisory position.) But if GS-13 is the highest for the position and you have to get a supervisory role to move up, this can be much harder just due to limited supervisory positions available. Performance bonuses are very small in gov. As a GS-14 and a high performer (according to the bosses), my highest award was $3500 pre-tax. That was a year where we had an unusually high award budget and I know that’s a high bonus compared to others in my agency. Maybe the IRS has a bigger award budget as a large agency, but I doubt it’s comparable to certain private sector professional bonus systems.
I wouldn’t bank on the IRS being a 40 hour a week job during tax season, and would ask to speak with a current employee to get a better sense of that. My understanding is the IRS has a lot of overtime and lack of flexibility during tax season. Except I’m not sure you’re not eligible for overtime pay as an accountant and you might only get credit hours (vacation hours, but you can only roll over 24 hrs from any pay period so not helpful if you’re slammed for a couple months). Maybe you can get comp time which can be used as vacation or cashed out at end of year. Note that IRS employees were called back during the six week gov shutdown, which means they had to work unpaid for several weeks until the shutdown was over. Not a huge deal for those of us with savings, but most people don’t like the idea of working and not getting paid regardless, so something to consider.
