Following the launch of the first edition of the Retirement Security Report, Equable Institute is announcing it will in the coming months use the tool’s underlying scoring system to determine how well proposed statewide public retirement system legislation would benefit workers and their state’s Public Retirement Policy Score.

State legislatures every year propose, pass, and sign into law varying legislation that impacts the retirement systems and benefits for millions of teachers, municipal employees, public safety officers, and state workers. This includes changes to certain benefits such as cost-of-living adjustments, changing plan types for future hires, and increases to member contribution rates. At times, these changes are beneficial to public workers and help improve the quality of their benefits and better prepare them for retirement. Yet many laws have had a negative impact on those benefits and made it harder for workers to get on a path toward adequate retirement income.

These evaluations will be added to Equable’s Retirement Security Report, an interactive digital report that evaluates the quality of retirement benefits offered to public workers nationwide using customizable score cards for all 335 statewide retirement plans currently open to new hires.

The Retirement Security Report uses  a 70% income replacement rate as the threshold for adequate retirement income, along with 11 other metrics to evaluate how well workers are being served by their retirement plans. Because the needs of all workers are not the same, each retirement plan included in the report has unique retirement benefits scores for Short-Term Workers, Medium-Term Workers and Full Career Workers based on entry into their plans at the age of 25 and 40.

This project is intended to be a living and ever-expanding resource for state employees to learn about their state’s Public Retirement Policy Score. We will also periodically release further analyses of the underlying data and will be adding municipal and legacy plans to the interactive scorecard database in coming months.