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DD Form 616 is a Department of Defense form, not a service form: Report of Return of Absentee, used to Report of Return of Absentee. The DD prefix is the operative fact. It means one blank serves every military department — Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, Space Force, Coast Guard under Defense jurisdiction — plus the defense agencies and combatant commands. No branch variant exists.
Requirement traces to not stated; the form belongs to not stated. Everything about schedule sits below that in local instruction, which is where to ask if a date matters.
Current edition is not stated, carried as not stated. Check that against any copy you already hold before doing anything else — Department-level revisions land everywhere simultaneously, so a stale file is stale across the whole Department.
Formats: PDF. Length unknown pages, approximately unknown entries.
Skip xfdl unless the viewer is already installed. It is the IBM Lotus Forms format, adopted Department-wide for electronic forms and still present in the set for that reason; ordinary pdf software reports it as unreadable.
Nothing costs anything here. Work in a full desktop pdf application rather than a browser preview; field behaviour in browsers is unreliable.
Verify the edition before the first keystroke. The date on the form face should read not stated. If it does not, discard the file. Field numbering shifts between editions, and on a DD form the new layout reaches every receiving office in every service at once — there is no lag during which the old version is still normal somewhere.
For anything ambiguous in a specific field, the form's own instructions come first and not stated controls where the two differ.
Route it where not stated or local procedure directs, and keep a copy first. On a Department form the receiving office is frequently outside your own chain — another service, a defense agency, a joint command — which makes recovering a lost original slower than it would be internally.
Related forms are found by number alone. The DD sequence is one unified Department-wide series, so a cited number resolves to exactly one document with no branch qualifier needed.
Do not read across from a service number. DA numbering is Army-specific under an Army proponent; DD numbering is Department-wide under not stated or an equivalent Department office. The sequences are unrelated, so identical digits in each identify two different documents. Read the prefix, not the digits.
Editions change when the prescribing directive is reissued, when the data collected changes, or when notice language is amended. None of that reaches you. Checking not stated at download is the entire defence, and it is cheaper than repeating a submission.
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 616?
- Report of Return of Absentee
- Which edition is current?
- Not stated by the publisher
- Who is responsible for this form?
- Not stated
- In which formats can it be downloaded?