Public Retirement Research Database

Equable Institute’s Public Retirement Research Database is an open-source tool designed to provide access to the most up-to-date data on U.S. public retirement systems.

In recent years, a hypercomplex political and economic landscape has led to a wide range of claims about public sector pension plans. Our team has collected a comprehensive set of important information about state and local retirement plans that can be used by academic researchers, journalists, or other policy experts.

Explanation of where this data come from and why we publish this Public Retirement Research Database

There are a variety of different data sources covering both public pension funding and benefits. Researchers with the ability to collect primary source data should do so when possible. However, 50 state analyses are often complex projects that require substantial resources to survey. And adding to the complexity of public pension analysis is that from state to state the sources of data are highly variable and decentralized.

As part of Equable’s mission, we aim to improve the public’s general understanding of state and local pensions, and apply a rigorous framework to the collection and publication of data. We believe in open-source data as an institutional value and encourage all other non-profit organizations to similarly recognize that if they believe they are providing a public good that they should enable researchers, academics, journalists, and interested members of the public to look for themselves at data collected.

In January 2021, we published an essay called “A Pension Data Primer: What to Look for and Where” that outlined the various trade-offs between different sources for data on public pensions, and how any such dataset (including ours) should be assessed.

Following the publication of that piece we released the first edition of Equable’s Retirement Security Report (RSR), an interactive tool that allows public employees and retirees alike to look at the benefits being offered by their retirement system to see whether those benefits put them on a path toward a secure retirement income. As part of that project we released the source code and data via GitHub (linked here) in an effort to promote both transparency in our research and also to make those data available to researchers outside of Equable.

In this same vein, we are publishing all of the primary source data that we gathered as part of both the RSR project and the other research projects we have completed to date within Equable’s Public Retirement Research Database.

In all, we are publishing multiple datasets that offer a wealth of information about public retirement systems across the country.

The Equable Defined Benefit Finance Database provides a collection of some of the most commonly sought-after measures of retirement system funding, investment performance, contributions, and more for the past 20+ years. These data include 267 defined benefit retirement plans with more than $1 billion in liabilities, administered both at the state and municipal levels. We will continue to expand our data coverage to include more municipal plans and will offer periodic updates to ensure our data reflect the most current totals reported by the retirement systems.

The Equable Public Retirement Benefits Database provides some level of coverage for more than 3,300 plans or classes of benefits addressing the benefits offered by final average salary pension plans, defined contribution plans, guaranteed return plans, and hybrid plans. We will continue to expand our data coverage to include more legacy plans offered at the state level and additional municipal plans offered across the country.

The Equable Retirement Security Report Database offers the complete results of our research and provides each of the scores that can be found in the RSR interactive tool linked here.

The Equable Sources of State Unfunded Liabilities Database provides a compilation of available actuarial gain/loss data for state administered retirement systems to offer insights into the root causes behind unfunded liabilities from 2001 through 2020.

As for each of the databases available here, our data draw on public documents to compile all of our variables ranging from plan funding and investment performance to the benefit design elements of public retirement systems. These data include those where we have complete, verified data for at both the state and municipal level, and partial data that we have identified but whose data we are still in the process of compiling and checking for accuracy. It is our hope that releasing these data in their current form will provide researchers a means to explore the state of retirement funding and the retirement benefits being offered to public employees to help further the field. We welcome inquiries from any researchers who have questions or who may like any additional assistance when it comes to public retirement benefits.