Enlisted Performance Reports (EPRs)

Your performance in the Air Force isn't judged by gut feelings or informal reputation. It's documented on paper, scored with points, and tied directly to whether you promote. The record is also permanent: boards reviewing Senior NCO candidates examine evaluations going back to the earliest enlisted grades, so what you do as a Senior Airman can still matter when you compete for Master Sergeant a decade later.

You're years away from your first evaluation. Understanding the system now explains why supervisors care so much about documentation, and why "just doing your job" isn't enough to stand out in a competitive promotion system.

Bullets out, narratives in

In 2023 the Air Force replaced the traditional bullet-format EPR with the Enlisted Performance Brief (EPB) (2). The old system crammed terse, abbreviation-heavy bullet statements into rigid line counts on AF Form 910 (Airmen through TSgt) and AF Form 911 (MSgt through CMSgt). The new DAF Form 716 organizes your performance into four Major Performance Areas, each described in a narrative statement of up to 350 characters (3).

Everything runs digitally through myEval; paper forms 715 and 716 survive only as rare, exception-only backups. The platform launched in January 2022 with significant technical issues, was rebuilt as myEval 2.0 on the Salesforce cloud, and now auto-populates your data from the Military Personnel Data System (7).

The narratives are written against the 10 Airman Leadership Qualities (ALQs), grouped by Major Performance Area (4):

The governing instruction for all of it is AFI 36-2406, currently dated 22 August 2025 (1).

Who writes it, and in what order

Your Rater is your direct supervisor: the person who watches you work every day and writes your narrative statements. The Additional Rater (typically your Rater's supervisor) reviews the assessment and concurs or non-concurs. The Higher Level Reviewer finalizes the evaluation, checks policy compliance, and adds a statement of up to 250 characters. For Master Sergeant and Senior Master Sergeant evaluations, a Senior Rater handles stratifications: rankings that compare you directly against your peers (1).

Digital signatures enforce the sequence. Once your Rater signs, that portion locks and the Additional Rater's section opens, which prevents unauthorized changes and leaves a clean audit trail.

Off-duty performance counts too: volunteerism, continuing education, community involvement. Primary duty still carries the most weight, and a meaningful leadership role in one volunteer organization will always outperform scattered, surface-level involvement across many. More in off-duty activities.

The closeout date never moves

Evaluations close out on fixed annual Static Closeout Dates (SCODs), one per rank:

Completed evaluations must be filed within 60 calendar days of closeout, and enlisted SCOD extensions are not authorized (the AFI's extension provision is explicitly officers-only). For enlisted members, the date is the date (1).

Work backwards from yours: start gathering accomplishment inputs 60 days out and hand your supervisor a complete draft 30 days out. You get revision time instead of a scramble, and a supervisor juggling multiple evaluations gets an early start.

How an EPB becomes promotion points

The Weighted Airman Promotion System (WAPS) decides Staff Sergeant and Technical Sergeant promotions by points, and evaluation points dominate. Each cycle, your commander assigns a promotion recommendation under strict quotas that prevent grade inflation (1):

"Promote" is the standard rating; about 80 to 85% of eligible Airmen receive it. That's not a bad rating. It means you're meeting standards and still competitive. But the 20-point gap between Promote and Must Promote on your most recent evaluation can decide whether you promote or wait another year. At the other end, "Not Ready Now" earns zero points and typically brings career counseling and an improvement plan. Serious, not career-ending: strong follow-up evaluations rebuild your trajectory, and that kind of recovery is exactly the growth boards notice.

The Promotion Recommendation Score (PRS), implemented in October 2021, counts up to three evaluations in your current grade, weighted hard toward the newest (5). Older evaluations add only 5 to 20 points each; reaching the maximum of 285 takes three straight Promote Now ratings (250 + 20 + 15). A first-time tester with a single Promote Now already holds 250 points. The system rewards current performance, not history. The full point tables are in the promotion system section.

Those 285 possible points sit atop a WAPS total of roughly 490, with the rest coming from promotion testing and decorations (1). That is what makes your evaluation record more decisive than every other factor combined. For Master Sergeant and above, the formula changes entirely: no testing points, just a Central Selection Board reviewing up to five years of evaluations, where sustained superior performance across cycles is the decisive factor.

Same standards, three sets of paperwork

Active Duty, Reserve, and Guard all use the same evaluation forms, the same ALQ framework, and the same core criteria. The differences are administrative, not philosophical (1):

AGR members in both components follow Regular Air Force SCODs, while Traditional Reservists and IMAs run on separate SCOD tables. One quirk worth knowing: a Traditional Reservist can supervise and rate Regular Air Force personnel only while on consecutive active-duty orders of at least 120 calendar days (1).

The practical implication if you're weighing the Guard or Reserve: a supervisor who sees you only on drill weekends has limited visibility on what you accomplish between UTAs. Keep a running log and share it regularly.

Your first EPB is years away. The habit isn't.

Since January 2018, formal evaluations are not required for Airman First Class and below with less than 36 months in service (6). Your first EPB lands at the first 31 March SCOD after you sew on Senior Airman or pass 36 months, whichever comes first.

The paper trail starts far earlier. Supervisors must give initial feedback within 60 days of beginning your supervision and follow-ups every 180 days, and a commander can direct an evaluation for any Airman after 20 months of service to document substandard performance (1).

If it isn't written down, it didn't happen

The Air Force evaluates documented accomplishments. Maintain a personal log with dates, metrics, and outcomes for everything significant. Save emails, award certificates, and recognition letters, and record volunteer work and education milestones the day they happen. When your supervisor asks for inputs, you hand over a complete list instead of reconstructing eight months from memory.

Then quantify. "Maintained security systems" is a duty. "Identified critical vulnerability in $2.1M security system, led 4-person repair team, restored full capability in 48 hours with zero mission delays" is an accomplishment. Dollar values of equipment, percentages improved, people trained, hours saved, sorties supported: those tell the story. Skip meaningless inflation, though; stating that you "toured a $55M facility" communicates nothing about your contribution.

You won't write your own EPB. Your Rater does that. You are expected to provide well-organized inputs, ideally grouped by the four Major Performance Areas, and the ARPC ALQ Writing Guide is the best official resource for the format. This is standard practice across the Air Force, not self-promotion.