The five funds
New York City runs five pension systems, each with its own board, its own members and its own funding position. Select a fund to open its full ledger.
History
These two measures use different bases, so read them separately: the accounting basis marks investments at market value on a single day each June, so it swings with the market. The funding basis smooths investment gains and losses over several years, which is why it moves more slowly.
Scenarios
Two things drive everything here: what the funds earn on their investments, and what the city decides to pay in. Move the controls and watch both the funded ratio and the bill move with them. This is a simple projection built from the fiscal 2025 position, not a forecast, and the arithmetic behind it is written out in full at the bottom of this section.
Read these as arithmetic, not as advice. If the required contribution comes out below what the city pays today, that does not mean the city is overpaying. New York City's actual contribution is set by a funding method that smooths investment returns over several years, amortizes the gap on fixed schedules and values each benefit tier separately. This model does none of those things, and it holds the investment return steady instead of letting it swing the way real markets do. It is here to show which levers matter and roughly how much. Do not budget from its numbers.
How the projection works
Every input below is taken from the fiscal 2025 data on this page. Starting from this year's assets and liability, each future year is rolled forward one step:
The required contribution is then solved numerically: the model searches for the level percentage of payroll that lands the funded ratio exactly on your target in your target year.
What this does not do: model each of the six benefit tiers separately, project mortality or retirement behavior, account for the variable annuity programs or vary returns year to year. A real actuarial valuation does all of those things. Treat the output as an order of magnitude, not a number to quote.
What it costs you
The figures here are the city's own General Fund pension contribution, which is what New York City taxpayers actually pay. It is smaller than the total employer contribution to the five funds, because the Transit Authority, Health + Hospitals, the City University and other employers pay their own share.
Methodology
Nothing on this page is estimated except the scenario projection, which is labelled as such everywhere it appears. Everything else is read directly out of published documents by a script in this project's repository, which can be re-run to reproduce the data file exactly.
Sources
- New York City Office of the Actuary, GASB 67/68 reports. The core of this dashboard. The fiscal 2025 report supplies fiscal 2016 through fiscal 2025; the fiscal 2020 report supplies fiscal 2013 through fiscal 2015, which later reports drop off the front of their ten-year schedules. Each fund's Appendix page 8 gives total pension liability, plan fiduciary net position, net pension liability, funded ratio, contributions, benefit payments and covered payroll. Fiscal 2025 report (PDF).
- New York City Comptroller, Annual Comprehensive Financial Report for fiscal 2025. The city's own General Fund pension contribution, real estate tax collections and total expenditures, fiscal 2016 through fiscal 2025, from the ten-year trend schedules in the statistical section. Annual reports.
- Public Plans Database, Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. The longer funding-basis history back to fiscal 2001, compiled from the systems' own actuarial valuations. publicplansdata.org.
- United States Census Bureau, American Community Survey one-year estimates. Population and household counts used as denominators.
Definitions
- Total pension liability is the value today of pension payments already earned by current and former employees. It is not the cost of the pension system forever; it is the bill for work already done.
- Plan fiduciary net position is the assets the fund holds, at market value on June 30.
- Net pension liability is the first minus the second: the part of the promise not yet funded.
- Funded ratio is assets divided by liability. A fund above 100 percent holds more than it needs today for promises already earned.
- Discount rate is the rate used to value future payments in today's money, set at 7.0 percent for all five funds. It doubles as the assumed long-term investment return.
- Covered payroll is the pay of employees covered by the plan, which is what contribution rates are expressed against.
What was checked
- Every fund-year read out of the actuary's reports is tested against the accounting identity, that total pension liability minus assets equals net pension liability, and against the actuary's own published funded ratio. All 65 fund-years pass both. The build fails loudly if any does not.
- The five funds' fiscal 2025 totals were checked against the summary table the actuary prints on page 3 of the report, and match exactly: $302,340.2 million in liability, $269,339.9 million in assets, $33,000.3 million net, 89.1 percent funded.
- The discount-rate sensitivity figures are checked against the total row the actuary publishes in the same table, and match at all three rates.
- Fund membership counts are checked to confirm that active, vested, non-vested and retired members sum to the published total for each of the five funds.
- Where the Public Plans Database repeated the prior year's actuarial values unchanged for all five funds, that year was dropped rather than charted as a flat line, because it is a carry-forward and not an observation.
- The chart palettes were run through a colorblindness and contrast validator, in both light and dark mode.
Cautions
- The accounting figures and the funding figures are different measurements and should not be compared with each other. The accounting basis marks assets to market on one day a year; the funding basis smooths them. The city sets contribution rates on the funding basis.
- The fiscal 2025 results rest on an actuarial valuation dated June 30, 2024, rolled forward. That is the actuary's standard practice.
- The funds also run variable annuity programs, discounted at a different rate. Those are folded into the totals as the actuary reports them and are not broken out.
- Membership counts are as of June 30, 2024, the census date of the valuation behind the fiscal 2025 report. The dollar figures are one year newer than the head counts.
- "Share of city spending" uses the Comptroller's ten-year trend line for General Fund expenditures, which excludes transfers for debt service. Counting those transfers, fiscal 2025 spending was about $117.7 billion and the pension share about 8.4 percent rather than 9.0 percent. The series used is consistent across all ten years shown.
- The comparison to the national average funded ratio comes from the Equable Institute's State of Pensions 2025 report, which puts the average for state and local plans at 82.5 percent. Equable measures on a market-value basis comparable to the accounting figures used here.
- The scenario projection is a simplification, described in full on the scenarios tab. It is not an actuarial valuation and should not be used as one.