The Leave and Earnings Statement is the most important financial document in military life and the one most members glance at only to confirm the deposit landed. It records your pay, your allowances, your deductions, your leave balance, and your retirement contributions, and errors on it are more common than people assume.
Reading it properly takes about five minutes a month and catches problems while they are still small.
The entitlements section lists base pay plus every allowance and special pay you are receiving. Base pay is taxable. Housing and subsistence allowances generally are not, which is why your take-home is a larger share of your gross than a civilian salary would suggest.
Check that special pays actually appear. Flight pay, sea pay, hazardous duty pay, and language pay start and stop with orders and assignments, and a pay that was supposed to start last month sometimes did not.
Deductions are amounts withheld: taxes, Social Security, Medicare, life insurance premiums, and retirement contributions. Allotments are payments you directed to be sent somewhere, such as to a bank account, an insurance company, or a family member.
Allotments are worth auditing once a year. They are easy to start and easy to forget, and members regularly discover they have been funding something for two years that they meant to cancel after one.
The leave section shows your balance brought forward, leave earned, leave used, and your projected balance, along with any use-or-lose figure. This is the block that matters most if you are approaching a PCS, a deployment, or separation.
Errors here are usually the result of leave that was taken but never entered, or entered twice. Both are correctable, and both are far easier to fix in the same month than a year later.
For members under the current retirement system, the statement shows your Thrift Savings Plan contributions and any government matching. If you are contributing below the level that earns the full match, you are leaving money on the table every month, and the statement is where you would see it.
The withholding section shows federal and state tax being withheld along with your claimed status. Members who moved, married, or had a child and never updated their withholding often find a surprise at tax time that the statement had been warning about for months.
The remarks block carries notices about pay changes, debts, upcoming stop dates on allowances, and corrections in progress. It is where a pending overpayment collection tends to appear first.
If you notice an overpayment before finance does, raise it. Unnoticed overpayments get recouped later, usually all at once, and usually at an inconvenient moment.
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