What is PCS?
What is PCS?
The military employs many acronyms, with PCS being one of the most significant. These three letters symbolize something both exciting and daunting for military families: Permanent Change of Station.
The Department of Defense provides financial allowances to offset the costs associated with moving. Please visit your local transportation office for an understanding of entitlements based on rank, dependency status and move type.
Permanent Change of Station (PCS)
Military life can be full of acronyms, which can sometimes be daunting to new military families. One acronym in particular that should be familiarized is PCS (Personnel Command System).
PCS (permanent change of station) refers to any assignment, detail or transfer that transfers an active duty service member or unit from one duty station to another within an active duty system. While PCSs usually involve relocation within active duty service stations themselves, they can also include moving overseas either accompanied or unaccompanied.
PCS moves can quickly add up, eating into monthly allowances. But with careful planning, service members and their families can minimize expenses.
To help offset the expense of PCSing, the Department of Defense offers various entitlements in the form of monetary allowances. Your local transportation office can discuss what those are; here's an overview:
Personal Procurement Move (PPM)
Though military families may have little say over where and when they relocate, they do have some say over how. PPM (personally procured move) is a military-sponsored option where service members arrange and pay for moving costs such as movers, truck rentals and storage upfront – with reimbursement coming later from the government.
Military families navigating PPM typically rely on online resources like PCS checklists, installation websites and unit Facebook pages as resources for information on choosing their PPM provider. It is also crucial that they maintain an inventory of items as well as keeping a clean home for when the packers come.
When moving themselves, families must obtain preapproval from their transportation office and meet all required requirements before their move date. This includes counseling and approval to use temporary lodging allowance and purchasing third-party household insurance to cover potential loss or damage during transit. It's advisable to work with a local moving company so as to understand their policies and services more.
Relocation Assistance Program (RAP)
Moving can uproot families from many aspects of military life. Friends must leave behind, extracurricular activities may change and new jobs must be found; families with special needs often lose an existing support system upon moving.
At PCS time, service members and their families can receive allowances to cover moving costs and temporary living expenses. The weight allowance typically depends upon rank, dependency status and move type; military installations also provide services to assist settling in such as home finding assistance, community orientation meetings and school liaison services.
Research demonstrates that current programs and policies do mitigate family disruptions; however, further improvement could be made. To do this effectively, DOD should assess whether additional programs would better support various family circumstances. Furthermore, families can utilize SCRA in the event they receive PCS or deployment orders to break lease early without incurring penalty and potentially save money for other goals.
MilitaryINSTALLATIONS
Military installations often provide services that assist military families as they relocate and adjust to their new duty station, such as family support centers that can provide help with home sales/purchases/rentals/housing referrals/landlord/tenant disputes as well as relocation assistance for PCS moves and educational support services. Some installations also offer early intervention programs for children birth to three as well as 504 plans for students with special needs.
Military installations' websites provide invaluable resources for information about the area and its resources, like Military One Source's military installation directory with search features to quickly locate program and service details as well as check-in procedures, schools, surrounding community information and any other details of significance.
Installation Resilience program activities provide local civilian jurisdictions (states, counties, cities and towns; tribal governments; other instrumentalities of states; and private entities) the chance to partner with their military installation as "one community", in order to identify manmade and natural threats that might disrupt military operations. This program unifies installation resilience studies with compatible use studies (formerly Joint Land Use Studies or JLUS), creating one comprehensive program continuum.
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What is PCS? The military employs many acronyms, with PCS being one of the most significant. These three letters symbolize something both exciting and daunting for military families: Permanent Change of Station. The Department of Defense provides financial allowances to offset the costs associated with moving. Please visit your local transportation office for an understanding…