Equable Institute’s Retirement Security Report evaluates the quality and value of public retirement plans in the United States to determine how well workers are served by their plans. The resulting scores were used to create the retirement plan ranking below.
Equable Insights
- Plans covered: 1,954 public retirement plans, including plans open to new members and legacy plans
- Metrics evaluated: 11 important retirement plan design metrics, including benefit values, flexibility and mobility, and sustainability
- Retirement Benefits Scores: Averages listed in table below; scores for short-term, medium-term, and full-career workers also available
Public Retirement Plan Ranking
Equable’s retirement plan ranking offers a general idea of how well retirement plans serve all workers enrolled in each plan. However, these scores are averages across career tenures and ages at hire.
Your plan may serve you better or worse than the average. To see how your plan serves you, access its interactive individual retirement security scorecard here: Retirement Security Report.
If you are a teacher, you can see where your plan ranks here: The Best U.S. States for New Teacher Retirement Benefits.
Search for your individual plan using the table below. We’ll add to the Retirement Security Report list as it’s updated to include more plans, including legacy and municipal plans.
How the Retirement Security Report Evaluates Public Plans
The Retirement Security Report is an interactive report that evaluates the quality of retirement benefits offered to public workers nationwide. It uses customizable score cards for 1,954 public plans, including 579 currently open to new hires and 1,214 legacy plans. While most analyses of public retirement plans focus on the sustainability of public retirement systems and their costs, the Retirement Security Report is focused on the value of benefits being offered to public sector workers to determine if individual plans are providing a path to retirement income security for municipal employees, public safety officers, state workers, and teachers based on career tenure and age.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Retirement security is all about having adequate retirement income, which we define as a 70% replacement of one’s final average salary. See the full methodology for more detail.
Retirement Security Report scores are measured according to three intuitive assessments for each worker profile:
- Serve workers well: Plans that score 75% or more of the available points
- Serve workers moderately well: Plans that score between 50% and 75% of the available points
- Do not serve workers well: Plans that receive fewer than 50% of the available points
See the full methodology for more detail.
The duration of a public employee’s career determines which aspects of a retirement plan’s design are most important, so we measure the quality of benefits offered for three categories of public workers:
- Short-term workers: Those who spend 10 years or less in the same retirement plan should focus most on eligibility rules, the adequacy of benefits, and benefit portability.
- Medium-term workers: Those who spend between 10 and 20 years in the same retirement plan should care most about the adequacy of benefits, whether benefits will be inflation-adjusted, and flexibility rules.
- Full-career workers: Those who spend their entire career in the same retirement plan should primarily care about the adequacy of benefits and inflation adjustment of their retirement income.
See the full methodology for more detail.