Postal Service employees are provided both sick and annual leave at the same rates as other federal sector employees. However, Postal Service employees have a higher annual leave carryover limit than their federal sector counterparts. Postal Service employees used an average of 10.77 days of sick leave per career employee during 2003.

     Earned annual leave may be donated to other career or transitional Postal Service employees who have exhausted their own leave due to a serious health condition. Postal employees donated over 302,000 hours of annual leave in 2003 to other postal employees with serious health conditions.
     
Under the Family and Medical Leave Act, eligible employees may take up to 12 weeks off from work for covered conditions. Postal Service employees may use annual leave, sick leave, or leave without pay for covered conditions in accordance with applicable collective bargaining agreements and current leave policies.

     Postal Service career nonbargaining unit employees and some bargaining unit employees can participate in a leave exchange program. This allows a portion of annual leave that would otherwise be earned in the following year to be exchanged for cash. There were approximately 23,000 bargaining and nonbargaining employees that participated in the 2003 leave exchange program.

     The Postal Service allows the use of 80 hours of accrued sick leave for dependent care under a policy available to all career employees.

     Health care contributions, including Medicare taxes, for current employees totaled $4.526 billion or 9.0 percent of the Postal Service's total pay and benefits during 2003.

     The Postal Service continued to pay most of the premium cost of employee health benefit coverage. Career employees are

automatically enrolled to pay their share of health benefit premium contributions with pretax payroll deductions.

     Under the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990, the Postal Service is required to fund the annuitants' share of the Federal Employee Health Benefit premiums. The cost of funding the health care benefits for postal annuitants and their survivors in 2003 was $1,133 million.

     The Federal Employees Group Life Insurance program provides life insurance coverage for Postal Service employees. The Postal Service assumes the full cost of basic life insurance for eligible employees. During 2003, Postal Service costs for employee life insurance were $194 million and cost of funding life insurance for postal annuitants and their survivors was $9 million.

Postal Service career employees, like federal career employees, are covered by one of three retirement systems administered by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.

     At the end of 2003, there were 727,763 career employees covered by a federal retirement program. Of this total 505,728 employees (69 percent) were covered by the Federal Employees Retirement System (FERS); 211,913 employees (29 percent) were covered by the Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS); 10,122 employees (2 percent) were covered by CSRS Offset.

     CSRS is a defined benefit retirement system. Annuity benefits are based on an employee's high-three average salary and years of service. CSRS Offset is similar to CSRS but requires Social Security contributions. Upon Social Security eligibility, the CSRS annuity is reduced (offset) by any Social Security benefit resulting from periods of CSRS Offset service to produce a benefit equivalent to what would have been received under CSRS.

     FERS is a retirement system with both defined benefit and defined contribution components. Under FERS, employees receive