Keywords: New database: Aug. 16, 2010 Next update: Aug. 2011

State and Local Government Public-Employee Retirement Systems

State and Local Government Public-Employee Retirement Systems provides revenues, expenditures, financial assets, benefits, and membership information for defined benefit public employee retirement systems. Data are collected through regular surveys; these surveys cover retirement systems that are sponsored by a recognized unit of government with membership of public employees who are compensated with public funds. Some data are modified by Census analysts. Only data that are reported by pension funds in surveys are included in this database; i.e., imputed data are not included. Users should note that some variables are no longer collected. For example, under the scrollbox "Holdings and Investments," the variable Employee Retirement-Security-Corporate Stocks (at cost), book value was terminated in 2001. Similarly, because these data are collected through a survey, some retirement systems do not report data in all years. In both of these cases, we report these variables as NA. Survey forms are available through the U.S. Census Bureau which is the source for these data.

Note to users: We have observed a limited number of apparent data entry errors in individual year records for some pension systems. As a particular example, we have observed several anomalies reported by the University of California Retirement System, e.g., amount contributed by state employees for financing benefits. These errors may lead to erroneous results in some variables that we calculate. Until we resolve this input error with the Bureau of the Census, users should exercise caution and judgement in using this database.