Phased retirement is only available to tenured faculty members. Phased retirement is not available for clinical or research faculty in health affairs units or for long-term, full-time but non-tenure teaching faculty.

During phased retirement, you give up your tenured status, but UNC System policy allows you to retain the right to vote on personnel recommendations that confer tenure or promotion, to the extent already provided to faculty of your rank.

Full-time administrators are not eligible. However, faculty who occupy full-time administrative or staff positions can become eligible when they vacate the administrative or staff position.

In these cases, the full-time administrator should first notify their supervisor of the plan and discuss returning to faculty service on a part-time basis. At the same time, the administrator should contact the chair of the academic department in which they hold tenure to design a work plan with the chair of the plan. The application should be submitted to the chair with a copy to the current supervisor. The academic chair should then consider the application along with others in the department.

To be eligible for the program, faculty must be in full-time status (e.g., 1.0 FTE).

Faculty authorized for less than full-time status in a current tenured faculty position will need to return to and work in full-time status for no less than 180 calendar days prior to entering the phased retirement program. Faculty in this situation should contact their Department Chair and seek return to full-time status with the intent to enter phased retirement.

Leave-earning faculty members may use accumulated vacation and bonus leave before the date of their retirement, i.e. before entering phased retirement, or the leave will be forfeited.

Faculty members participating in the Teacher’s and State Employee’s Retirement System (TSERS) retiring, any sick leave hours you have will be added to your TSERS service credit which results in a larger monthly benefit.

Faculty members participating in the Optional Retirement Program (ORP) will forfeit any remaining sick leave balance upon entering phased retirement.

Under phased retirement, your health insurance is provided to you as a retiree through the State Retirement System if you are in receipt of a monthly benefit from your ORP or TSERS retirement accounts. As a half-time employee, you are allowed to continue your NCFlex/UNC System benefits such as dental, vision and flexible spending accounts through UNC-Chapel Hill. If enrolled in the UNC System Life Insurance plan, this may be continued as a retiree at the individual policy rate.

Retirees who have completed five years of service and are in receipt of a monthly retirement benefit are eligible for retiree health insurance. Cost depends on upon the first-hired date and can be discussed with the UNC Benefits Team. Those over age 65 will also need to enroll in Medicare A and B effective July 1 (the phased retirement date). Everyone pays a Medicare Part B premium.

Emeritus status
The policies on conferring emeritus rank are unaffected by Phased Retirement. Emeritus status can be given at the conclusion of phased retirement.

Fixed-term titles
The intent of the Phased Retirement Program is for re-employed faculty to retain the title they had before resignation.

Named / Distinguished professorships
If the faculty member who holds a named or distinguished professorship enters phased retirement resulting in their appointment becoming less than full-time, the faculty member is no longer eligible to hold a state-matching professorship.

Parking allocations are made at the departmental level. The Phased Retirement Program calls for faculty to retain their existing rights and privileges with the exception of tenure, and departments are encouraged to follow this guidance in allocating parking spaces.

However, this guidance should not be interpreted as a guarantee of parking availability since not all faculty members are eligible for parking permits. This issue should be discussed with your department.

During phased retirement, retirees can still contribute to supplemental IRA or Roth IRA accounts as these are private plans, phased retirees may also continue contributions to the supplemental retirement plans such as the UNC 403(b) and UNC 457

For UNC-Chapel Hill purposes, one-half of salary for active employment is a faculty member’s base salary, exclusive of any supplements received for special assignments or work that has a termination date. The State Retirement System, however, uses actual earnings subject to retirement contributions as the basis for its test of one-half salary for monitoring retiree earnings limits.

Because of this, there may be a difference between the one-half salary that an eligible employee may receive from UNC-Chapel Hill under the phased retirement program and the State Retirement System’s definition of one-half of final salary. Therefore, it may be possible that a faculty member’s one-half salary amount may be lower than the amount that the State Retirement System may use to determine if a faculty member has exceeded the 50% earnings limit.

In some cases, for example, a faculty member may have received supplements for additional employment or summer school that may increase the State Retirement earnings limit, but these supplements will not increase the base pay for purpose of calculating one-half of base pay at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Note: Faculty members in the Optional Retirement Program are not subject to the rules that limit earnings after retirement.

In phased retirement, you fully retire but have a three-year work contract. To balance out the .5 FTE for the year, you may work any combination of the two semesters each academic year (i.e., 75/25, 70/30, 65/35, etc.) that equates to .5 FTE for the year.

A faculty member in Phased Retirement may teach in summer session. However:

• Summer teaching cannot be part of the Phased Retirement “half-time” work plan negotiated with the department chair.
• The University or the faculty member’s department is under no obligation to offer summer teaching.
• A Phased Retiree’s summer teaching appointment must have the approval of the department chair and the dean of Summer School.
• Payment for summer teaching may not be calculated on the same basis as that for full-time faculty.

A Phased Retiree is a part-time employee and the Summer School dean establishes pay schedules for part-time Summer School employees, so only the dean of Summer School can answer questions about compensation for Phased Retirees teaching a summer course.

For faculty members in TSERS | Faculty members, if permitted to do so within their TSERS retirement earnings limit, may teach summer school while in Phased Retirement in addition to the agreed-upon responsibilities and compensation in the work plan. Faculty members who are in TSERS may NOT teach second session summer school during the summer they enter the Phased Retirement program. Each phased retiree retired from TSERS is responsible for earning their maximum earnings limit while at UNC.

For more information about teaching Summer School, see the Post-Retirement Earnings webpage.

The UNC-Chapel Hill Phased Retirement program will provide for part-time re-employment for a three-year period after the resignation of the tenured position. This timeframe aligns with that of most other institutions.

SOM full-time tenured faculty are subject to the terms of the Clinical Faculty Compensation Plan, a faculty member’s “base compensation” under the Phased Retirement Plan shall be that individual’s Total Projected Salary (Academic Base Salary + Negotiated Component of Salary + estimated Bonus Salary) for the fiscal year immediately preceding the fiscal year in which the Phased Retirement Plan is implemented for that individual.

The Provost works to accommodate every request while balancing the educational needs of the University. Only in very rare cases would a regularly submitted request for phased retirement be denied.

For applicants
Eligible faculty will receive phased retirement applications and processes. They will also receive information about returning the applications to the UNC Benefits Team.

For Chairs and Deans
Under the policy and procedures, the Chair of a department should accept all applications for the program, in the order in which they are received (please be careful to document the receipt of each application). In fact, the department chair cannot deny an application for phased retirement.

Upon forwarding the applications to the Dean, the Chair should comment upon concerns about the percentage of faculty who apply (especially if the number exceeds 25% of tenure track faculty in the department). The Dean will then be responsible for considering the situation and providing an appropriate recommendation to the Provost. In other words, the applications of all faculty who apply should be forwarded to the Dean. The Provost will make the final decision, after consultation with the Dean.

Note: If more than 25% of tenured faculty members in a department elect to enter the Phased Retirement Program, the dean should be consulted and will be responsible for making a recommendation to the Provost.

The phased retirement appointment/contract starts on July 1 of each year.

It is expected that each Dean will set an internal deadline for his or her College/School to receive faculty applications for the Phased Retirement Program. The Provost’s Office will encourage the Deans to communicate those deadlines to their units as soon as possible.

Phased Retirement Program Timeline for Tenured Faculty

November
Phased Retirement letters and informational packets sent to eligible faculty

November – February
Interested faculty can schedule a phone or Zoom consultation regarding the Phased Retirement program and its benefits with Joe Williams, Senior Director of Benefits, Leave Administration and Total WellBeing, by emailing him at joe_williams@unc.edu.

February 21, 2025
Deadline for Phased Retirement applications and the general release to be received by Joe Williams in the UNC Benefits Office. Email completed, signed applications and the notarized general release to joe_williams@unc.edu.

Late February

• Decisions made by Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost on received applications
• Eligibility verification complete
• Agreement and releases mailed to approved faculty members

March
Deadline for submission of signed releases to the UNC Benefits Team

March – April
Faculty to schedule appointments with UNC Benefits Team in the Office of Human Resources to complete retirement paperwork

July 1
Phased Retirement begins

For more information, reach out to Joe Williams, Senior Director of Benefits, Leave Administration & Total WellBeing at UNC-Chapel Hill: (919) 843-7874 or joe_williams@unc.edu

The full range of faculty activities should be considered in negotiating a faculty member’s work plan under the Phased Retirement Program.

Activities include:

• Undergraduate and/or graduate teaching
• Research and creative activities
• Academic advising
• Writing grants
• Publications
• Committee membership for graduate student thesis/dissertation research
• Presentations
• Participation in public service-related activities, professional society-related activities and/or departmental administrative activities

The percent of time an applicant will be involved in any of these activities will depend upon the level of time commitment agreed upon between the faculty member and the department head as they create the half-time work plan.

UNC System
Although the Summary document from the UNC System Office refers to limits on applications that may impair academic quality, progression towards degrees and other factors, in its plan, UNC-Chapel Hill only limits applications on the basis of not more than 25% of tenure track faculty in a department and not more than 10% of tenure track faculty across the University. Therefore, the UNC System Office limit reference does not apply at UNC-Chapel Hill. We acknowledge that this is confusing in the packet of information, but the General Administration requires us to deliver both the UNC Board of Governors’ policy and our specific policy to all faculty members who may be eligible.

UNC-Chapel Hill
The order of acceptance for applications to the Phased Retirement Program will be decided on a first-come, first-served basis. The date the application is received in the department’s office determines the order of priority. Therefore, it is important that department offices document the date and time of receipt of applications.

The limit will apply to the academic department, not to the Center. It will be necessary for the applicant and the Chair of the academic department to discuss fully the faculty work plans during the years of phased retirement.

Center Directors should contact the academic department when they receive an application so that the Chair of the department may consider the application.

If a faculty member holds a joint appointment in two academic departments, the application should be sent to the base department. The chairs of the departments that share the joint appointment should work together to make the budget and work plan arrangements.

University policy requires faculty to be employed at least 100% time to qualify for external funding. For faculty employed on a half-time (50%) basis will not be eligible for external funding, the University delegates to each dean or department chair the authority to determine if a faculty member is eligible to receive external funding through the University. Individual faculty members with questions about external funding should talk with their chair and dean.

Policy states that vacant positions are subject to review by the Provost for possible reallocation. The policy concerning the review of vacant positions by the Provost is unaffected by the Phased Retirement program. However, consideration of the effect of this program on resources to address instructional and research needs will be taken into consideration.

In cases where a faculty member in a department resigns and is re-employed under this program and a department chair is interested in replacing one-half of the person’s workload, the department chair should discuss the situation with the Dean after reviewing the applications and examining other resources available to address the department’s needs. The Dean will examine the needs across the school/college and address this issue with the Provost. In all cases, the department will have 1/2 of the retiring faculty member’s salary to pay that person at half salary for three years. The residual 1/2 salary is subject to review by the Dean and Provost.

If a faculty member holds a joint appointment in two academic departments, the chairs of the departments that share the joint appointment should work together to make the budget and work plan arrangements. The funding of the position will have to be handled carefully as will the negotiations about the faculty member’s part-time work plan.