You need DD Form 1561, and this page gives you the blank plus the steps for handling it. Start with what the form does: Statement to Substantiate Payment of Family Separation Allowance (FSA). Its official title is Statement to Substantiate Payment of Family Separation Allowance (FSA).
Then look at the edition date: not stated, publisher status not stated. After that, ask whether the form covers your situation. It almost certainly does regardless of your branch — DD forms run Department-wide rather than through a single service.
Then settle the schedule. You are working under not stated, with not stated responsible for the document, and your organization layers its own deadlines on that. Ask before you assume a date.
Before you download, pick your approach — editable file or printed page. What follows covers the formats first, then the entries, then what you do afterward.
Begin at the top and move down. Enter your identifying data first, then the body of the form, then the signature block. The sequence is printed in that order because entries below frequently follow from entries above.
Check the edition before you type a word. The date appears on the face of the form; it should read not stated. When it does not, discard the file and take a fresh copy from this page. Department-level revisions replace the blank across all services simultaneously, which means an old printout can be out of step everywhere.
For questions about a specific entry, check the form's own instructions, and if that does not settle it, open not stated. The directive controls where they differ.
Download the form
Step one is picking the format. You have PDF to choose from, across 1 pages, with approximately 59 fields to complete.
All of it downloads free. When you are ready to work, do this: save the file locally, then open it in a full pdf application. Browsers often ignore field properties, and you can lose everything you typed.
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
Submit the completed form through the channel not stated or your local guidance specifies. Save a copy for yourself before it leaves your hands, whether that means a scan, a photograph or a duplicate file.
Should you need a related form, look it up by its number. The DD sequence is Department-wide, which makes your search simple: no service qualifier, no branch-specific variant to track down.
Here is where people go wrong. They see a number in an instruction and download whichever form matches it. But DA and DD are separate systems — Army-specific in one case, Department-wide under not stated in the other — so check which series you were sent to before you take the file.
Come back and check the edition next time you need this form. Editions change when the prescribing directive is reissued, when the information collected changes, or when the required notice language is updated, and none of those events reaches you directly. Verifying not stated at the moment you download is the whole defence.
One thing this page does not do: tell you whether your submission will be accepted. We publish the document and explain how to complete it, and that is where our role ends. Nothing here is legal advice. Take questions about eligibility, applicability or procedure to not stated, to your 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?