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In-depth: Risk Sharing in Public Retirement Plans

Introduction

Nearly every state in recent years enacted reforms to pension plans within their purview. As a result, although most public employers in the U.S. have retained DB plans, in many plans, more risk has shifted from employers to employees.

The purpose of this paper is to increase knowledge and awareness of the wide variety of options that are currently being used to design and finance retirement benefits; it is not an endorsement of any particular plan design or feature. This paper describes risk-sharing features that are incorporated into public pension plans and provides case studies of specific plans that employ risk-sharing structures.

Date published

January 2019

Contact

Keith Brainard, Research Director
Alex Brown, Research Manager

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Introduction to Shared Risk in Public Pensions from NASRA on Vimeo.


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What's New at NASRA: Government Spending Issue Brief

NASRA’s March 2026 update on government spending makes a basic but important point: public pension benefits are not paid out of a government’s day-to-day operating budget. They are paid from trust funds that employees and employers contribute to during an employee’s working years. Those trusts distribute more than $400 billion each year to retirees and beneficiaries in communities across the country. On a national basis, employer contributions to pension trusts in FY 2023 equaled 5.16 percent of direct general spending by state and local governments, which shows that pension contributions remain a limited share of overall public spending even though the level varies from one state to another. 
The brief also shows that pension costs should be viewed in the context of the changes governments have made over the past 15 years to strengthen plan funding. Following the 2008–09 market decline, nearly every state and many local governments adjusted contributions, benefits, or both to improve pension sustainability. More recent data show that employer contributions increased from FY 2022 to FY 2023, but pension spending as a share of total government spending remained broadly stable. The updated brief provides FY 2023 figures and also projects the aggregate pension spending rate for FY 2024, offering a useful snapshot of both current costs and the longer funding trend.