Miami-Dade Fire Rescue
Your last six months, appointment by appointment
Miami-Dade County has a written retirement procedure with numbered steps and real deadlines in it. Almost nobody on the job has read it. This is that procedure, in order, plus the things it leaves out.
The administrative side here comes from Miami-Dade County Administrative Procedure 438, Retirement, effective September 2025, and from the Division of Retirement. Where the County has not written something down, this page says so instead of guessing.
The whole thing on one screen
The County's own timeline
| When | What has to happen | Who |
|---|---|---|
| 6 to 12 months out | Request a written benefit estimate. The County does not produce this. The state does. | You, to the Division of Retirement |
| 3 months out | Retirement counseling appointment. You complete the FRS application and choose your option in this meeting. | You, with the Benefits Administration Unit |
| 2 weeks out | Written notice of your retirement date to your supervisor. This is the County minimum. | You, to your supervisor |
| After the appointment | Benefits forwards a copy of your application to your departmental personnel representative. | Benefits Administration Unit |
| After you leave payroll | The Final Salary Certification goes to Tallahassee. Not before. After. | Payroll Information Management |
The sentence to keep in your head
The County's procedure says it plainly: retirement is not automatic and is not retroactive. You must apply. Nothing on this list happens because you hit a number of years. It happens because you made a phone call.
Step one, six to twelve months out
Get the estimate from the state, not from the County
The first step in the County's own procedure is not a County step. You contact the Florida Division of Retirement, Bureau of Retirement Calculations, and ask for a benefits estimate. Six months to a year ahead. The County does not calculate your pension and cannot tell you what it will be.
Two things to do while you are on that call that the procedure does not tell you to do.
- Ask for more than one separation date. The difference between going out in March and going out in October can be larger than people expect, and the estimate is free. Ask for three.
- Ask for the estimate under each option. You are going to be asked to choose Option 1, 2, 3 or 4 in a room downtown in a few months, and you want those numbers in front of you long before you get there.
Division of Retirement, 844-377-1888. You can also pull estimates through your FRS Online account, but get the written one from the Bureau as well, because that is the one the counseling appointment expects you to walk in holding.
Step two, before you book anything
Use the planner you are already paying for
FRS membership includes financial planning help at no additional cost to you. Not a sales appointment. A planning service the system pays for. Most members go their entire career without using it once, then make the largest financial decision of their life in a thirty minute meeting with a form in front of them.
Call the MyFRS Financial Guidance Line at 866-446-9377 and ask to schedule a session with a financial planner. Bring the estimates from step one. The point of this conversation is to walk into the County appointment with the option decision already made, because of what happens in that room.
Step three, three months out
The appointment downtown
This is the one. Call 305-375-4161 and book a retirement counseling appointment with the Benefits Administration Unit, People and Internal Operations Department. The County's procedure says three months before your planned retirement date, or before you enter DROP.
The office is downtown, at 111 NW 1st Street, Suite 2324. Budget the whole morning. You are not stopping by to pick something up. You are completing your application for retirement and making your option election in that meeting.
What you have to physically carry in
- Your FRS benefit estimate from step one.
- A valid driver license that is compliant with the federal REAL ID Act. If yours is not REAL ID compliant, fix that first. That alone can cost you the appointment.
- Proof of age. A birth certificate, an unexpired United States passport, or a Certificate of Naturalization.
- If you have none of those, bring two of the following: a birth certificate of your own child that shows your age, a baptismal certificate more than thirty years old, a hospital birth record, or a grammar school enrollment record.
- If you are electing a survivor option, your beneficiary needs the same kinds of documents. Do not find this out at the counter.
If you are married and you choose Option 1 or Option 2, your spouse has to sign
Those are the two options that leave your spouse with nothing after you die. The County procedure requires a married employee choosing either one to have the spouse acknowledge it in writing. Which means that decision is happening whether or not you have talked about it at home, and the worst possible place to have that conversation for the first time is at a counter downtown with a form in front of you.
What the specialist is not allowed to do
Straight from the procedure: the Senior Employee Benefits Specialist will explain the options but cannot advise which to choose. That is not them being unhelpful. That is the rule they work under. If you walk in hoping somebody there will tell you the right answer, nobody is going to, and you will choose under time pressure. Walk in with the decision already made.
For members not entering DROP, group insurance counseling happens in the same session. That is where your retiree coverage election gets explained, and you already know from the main Miami-Dade page that coverage has a 30 day deadline and does not come back once cancelled.
After the appointment, the Benefits Administration Unit forwards a copy of your retirement application to your departmental personnel representative. That is the first moment the department officially has it in hand.
If you are coming out of DROP
There is a second appointment, and it is easy to miss
Members ending DROP have to contact the Benefits Administration Unit after receiving their FRS packet, to complete exit paperwork and get insurance counseling. It is a separate step from the one you did on the way in, and it is the step people skip because they assume the paperwork they signed eight years ago covered it.
It did not. Call 305-375-4161 again when that packet arrives.
Step four, two weeks out
Written notice, and why two weeks is the wrong number
The procedure requires written notice of your expected retirement date to your supervisor at least two weeks in advance. That is the County's legal minimum and you should treat it as exactly that.
Two weeks does not give the battalion time to backfill your spot, does not give your personnel representative time to chase a payroll problem, and does not give anybody time to plan anything for your last shift. Nobody is going to be upset that you told them early. The only person two weeks protects is somebody leaving in a hurry, and that is not you.
Put the date in writing even if you have already said it out loud a hundred times. Written notice is a step in the procedure, and verbal does not satisfy it.
Step five, after you are off payroll
The form that moves last, and holds everything up
Payroll Information Management sends the Final Salary Certification to the Division of Retirement in Tallahassee after you have been removed from payroll. Not when you apply. Not on your last day. After.
Your benefit cannot be finalized until Tallahassee has it. So this is the one piece of your retirement that moves entirely without you, after you no longer work there, and it is the most common reason a first check is late. Two weeks after your last day, email and ask whether it went and on what date. Keep the reply.
And the deadline attached to it
If the Division does not receive your application within 30 days of your retirement date, your effective date moves to the first of the month after they receive it. A month of pension, gone, because paper moved slowly between two offices.
The part no procedure covers
The station, your chief, and your gear
Here is where the documents run out. I read Administrative Procedure 438 line by line. It covers the pension, the appointment, the documents and the notice. It says nothing about your leave balances and nothing about returning County property. The union contract has no checkout process in it either.
So this part is from having done it. Practices change and the people change, so confirm anything here with your own chain of command. But this is how it went for me.
Where the gear actually goes
You take it to the Fire Department Supply and Equipment Center, next to Station 13. Bunker gear, masks, any other issued equipment, your keys to any fire station, and your entrance badges all go back there. It is a physical trip you have to plan, not something that happens at your own station on your last tour.
The helmet, which is the question everybody actually has
If you want to keep your helmet, your battalion chief has to put in a request for it. It is not automatic, it is not something you arrange yourself at supply, and it is not a conversation to start on the day you are turning gear in. Ask your chief early, while there is still time for a request to move through the department. That one sentence is the reason guys who asked months out are the ones who have their helmet on a shelf.
Badges and cards
- Badges you were awarded, you keep. Those are yours.
- Entrance and access badges go back with the rest of the gear at supply.
- Official cards go back to Fire Rescue headquarters, and you make an appointment to turn them in to an official there. Another trip, another appointment, and worth putting on the calendar rather than discovering at the end.
- The retiree card is a different thing entirely. It is not an operational credential and it does nothing that a working firefighter's identification does. It is retiree identification, and it carries whatever privileges the department extends to retirees.
What your battalion chief actually does
Less than people assume, and that is worth knowing so you do not sit waiting on him. His formal role is processing the internal documentation of your intention to retire. The pension, the appointment downtown, the insurance election and the subsidy application are all yours to drive. What he controls that matters to you is the helmet request and the practical sequencing of your last tours. Those are the two things to put to him directly.
The last day
The department does not organize anything unless there is a specific firefighter being honored for something. Whatever happens on your last day gets put together by the guys you worked with. For those working that day, names of the retiring firefighter get announced over the radio, and the department says goodbye to you the same way it talked to you for twenty years.
I mention that because people quietly worry about it and nobody says it out loud. Nobody from headquarters is coming. Your crew handles it, and they do it well.
The things it is easy to forget
- Your County email goes away. Anything in there you want, including years of records, is gone the day they close the account. Move it before your last day.
- Pull your training and certification records now. Paramedic, EMT, state fire certifications, specialty teams, instructor cards. If you ever want to teach, consult or work in the industry again, you want those in your own hands and not in a system you no longer have a login for.
- Write down who to call. One page with your personnel representative, Benefits at 305-375-5633, the Division at 844-377-1888, the union at 305-593-6100 and your 457 provider. Give a copy to your spouse.
Burning your remaining hours
The last decision, and the one with real money hidden in it
Here is what a lot of guys do, and it is common enough that it is practically standard. Rather than work right up to the separation date, you take whatever hours you have left, allocate them, and tell your battalion chief how you intend to use them to carry you to the day you officially separate. Plenty of firefighters stop physically coming in well before their last official day for exactly this reason. The hours run out and the separation date arrives.
There is nothing wrong with that. It has to be allocated and approved through your chief and documented like any other leave. But almost nobody runs the numbers first, and there are real numbers here.
The rule that makes this worth calculating
The state treats the same hours completely differently depending on how you take them.
Sick leave paid to you as a lump sum is not compensation for retirement purposes. The Division's own language is that those payments "are not considered wages for retirement purposes and should not be reported," whether paid during employment, at termination or at retirement. Not one hour of a sick leave payout does anything for your pension.
Salary paid to you while you are using that same sick leave is covered. Sick leave used to continue wage payments is covered for retirement purposes, because it is treated as a continuation of wages. Same hours. Completely different pension treatment.
Annual leave works on a third set of rules. A lump sum payment for accumulated annual leave is covered, but only to a statutory maximum of 500 hours. Anything paid above 500 hours is not covered. Taken as actual leave, it is simply salary.
Put those together against what Miami-Dade pays, where annual leave accrues to 750 hours and a Special Risk member retiring after 25 years of full time County service is eligible for the full sick balance, and you can see the shape of it. A very large payout can be sitting in categories that do nothing for your pension, while the same hours taken as leave are covered wages and keep you employed and accruing service.
And the one case where none of this applies
If you are in DROP, your benefit is already frozen. Your service and your compensation stopped counting the day DROP began. Burning hours at the end of DROP does not raise a pension that was locked years earlier. The whole argument above is for members going out without DROP, or deciding before they elect it. Knowing which of those two you are is the first question, not the last.
What you are actually weighing
- Cash now against pension forever. A payout is a one time check taxed in one year. Covered wages and additional service credit follow you for life.
- Your separation date moves. Burning hours pushes the day you officially separate, which pushes your retirement effective date and the day your first pension check arrives. That is a real cost if you need the income to start.
- You are still an employee the whole time. Contributions continue, your coverage continues, and the six month reemployment clock has not started.
- It is not reversible. Hours you burn are not hours you get paid for, and hours you cash out are not hours you can burn.
None of that tells you what to do, and it should not, because the answer depends on your balances, your fiscal year pattern, whether you are in DROP and when you need income to start. What it tells you is that this is a calculation and not a habit. Most guys treat it as a habit because that is how it was explained to them in a kitchen. Get your hour balances from payroll in writing, get your estimate from the Division, and put the two side by side before you tell your chief how you are allocating anything.
Treatment of annual leave, sick leave and consolidated leave accounts is set out in the Division of Retirement Employer Handbook, Chapter 2. Leave originally earned as sick leave does not become covered by being moved into an annual leave account, so how your department carries the hours matters. Ask.
Take this with you
The short version, printed
- Six to twelve months. Call the Division of Retirement at 844-377-1888. Ask for a written estimate on three different dates, under every option.
- Five months. Call MyFRS at 866-446-9377. Book the free planner. Settle the option decision with your spouse.
- Same window. Tell your battalion chief your date. If you want your helmet, this is when you ask him to put in the request. Not later.
- Same window. Get your annual and sick hour balances from payroll in writing, and decide whether you are burning hours or cashing them out before you tell anybody how you are allocating them.
- Three months. Call 305-375-4161. Book the downtown appointment. Confirm your license is REAL ID compliant and find your proof of age before the day arrives.
- At the appointment. Application completed, option elected, insurance counseling done. Nobody there will tell you which option to pick.
- Thirty days. Retiree insurance election to the Benefits Division, and ideally ten days before your retirement date.
- Two weeks. Written notice to your supervisor. Earlier is better.
- Two weeks after your last day. Email and confirm the Final Salary Certification went to Tallahassee, and on what date.
- Before your last day. Plan the trip to the Supply and Equipment Center next to Station 13 for bunker gear, masks, keys and entrance badges, and book the appointment at Fire Rescue headquarters for your official cards.
- After you separate. File the HIS-1 for the Health Insurance Subsidy. It is not automatic.
Sources for this page
- Miami-Dade County Administrative Procedure 438, Retirement, effective September 2025
- Miami-Dade County Retiree Benefits Handbook, 2026 plan year
- Florida Division of Retirement, Employer Handbook Chapter 2, General Reporting of Wages and Retirement Contributions, and Chapter 9, Pension Plan Service Retirement
- MyFRS, Advisor Service and member resources
- Collective Bargaining Agreement between Miami-Dade County and IAFF Local 1403, October 1, 2023 through September 30, 2026
Procedures, phone numbers and office locations change. Confirm the appointment line and the document list when you call. The station level detail on this page comes from my own retirement from Miami-Dade Fire Rescue rather than from a published policy, because the County has not published one. Practices change and people change, so confirm anything in that section with your own chain of command.
Related
The rest of it
Questions about your own numbers
I sat in that office myself
I am Mark Buckley, retired Miami-Dade Fire Rescue. I wrote Beyond The Firehouse because these questions kept coming up in station kitchens and union halls and there was no plain language book that answered them for the fire service. If you want to go over your estimate and your option before that appointment, reach out. No cost, no pitch.
mark.buckley@prudential.com
305-608-2690