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The scope here is Department-wide. DD Form 1561 — Statement to Substantiate Payment of Family Separation Allowance (FSA) — exists to Statement to Substantiate Payment of Family Separation Allowance (FSA), and it applies across the services rather than inside one. That is what the DD prefix encodes: joint issue, single edition, every branch and defense agency working from identical paper.
Authority: not stated prescribes it, not stated maintains it. Those two names settle most disputes about why the form is being asked for. Local commands add timing on top; the requirement itself comes from above them.
Use not stated, status not stated. Older printings circulate widely and lose their currency Department-wide the moment a new edition issues.
Available: PDF, across 1 pages, roughly 59 fields. That is the whole scope of the download decision.
Fillable pdf is the default choice. Its boxes hold typed entries inside the document; the printable release is a static image of the same page with no interactive layer. Since DD forms routinely cross between services and agencies before they are filed, typed entries matter more here than on a form that stays inside one office.
Xfdl is a legacy Department format, IBM Lotus Forms, requiring the matching viewer. Its survival in DD distribution reflects how widely it was fielded across the Department, not any advantage over pdf today.
Free download, every format. Do not fill the form in a browser tab — browser pdf viewers handle interactive fields inconsistently and discard entries on close.
What the form asks for
- Cell1
- Cell2
- Cell3
- Cell4
- CurrentPage
- DesignApllication_version
- Draft
- Footer
- FormNumber_Date
- Frame
- HeaderRow
- Member
- Member_Signature
- Name
- Needs_DD67
- PAS
- Page1
- PageCount
- Pages
- PrintButton
- RadioButtonList
- ResetButton
- Row1
- Row2
Start by matching the printed date to not stated. Old blanks accumulate in shared folders for years. Because the Department reissues to all services in one action, nobody is still accepting the previous layout by local custom.
For anything ambiguous in a specific field, the form's own instructions come first and not stated controls where the two differ.
Submit to the office named in not stated or in local instruction; retain a duplicate before it leaves. Joint routing often sends a DD form across organizational boundaries, and tracing one afterward is not a same-day matter.
Look up cross-referenced forms by series and number. DD numbering is unified across the Department, which removes the usual step of identifying which service issued the thing.
Where a procedure cites both a service form and a DD form, the two are unconnected. Service numbering answers to a service proponent, DD numbering to not stated or another Department office, and the two sequences were never aligned. Matching numbers mean nothing whatever.
Revision follows directive changes, changed data requirements and amended notice language, unannounced. Verify not stated each time rather than trusting a saved copy — the cost of the check is seconds.
Limits of this page: it distributes a published Department of Defense document and describes it. No legal advice, no procedural ruling, no statement about whether any submission will be accepted. Applicability, eligibility and procedure belong to not stated, to a servicing personnel office, or to the office named in not stated.
Questions and answers
- What is DD Form 1561?
- Statement to Substantiate Payment of Family Separation Allowance (FSA)
- Which edition is current?
- Not stated by the publisher
- Who is responsible for this form?
- Not stated
- In which formats can it be downloaded?