PRB Pension Funding Guidelines

The Pension Review Board is in the process of updating the Pension Funding Guidelines and would appreciate your feedback on the draft revisions.

Please contact the agency via email ([email protected]) with any feedback or suggested changes by Friday, March 8th.

The purpose of the Pension Review Board’s Pension Funding Guidelines is to provide guidance to public retirement systems and their sponsoring governmental entities in meeting their long-term pension obligations. The Guidelines are intended to foster communication between plans and their sponsors as they determine a reasonable approach to responsible funding, whether the contribution rate is fixed or actuarially determined.


Public retirement systems should develop a funding policy, the primary objective of which is to fund the obligations over a time frame that ensures benefit security while balancing the additional, and sometimes competing, goals of intergenerational equity and a stable contribution rate.


         1. The funding of a pension plan should reflect all plan obligations and assets.
         2. The allocation of the normal cost portion of the contributions should be level or declining as a percentage of payroll over all generations of taxpayers, and should be calculated under applicable actuarial standards.
          3. Funding of the unfunded actuarial accrued liability should be level or declining as a percentage of payroll over the amortization period.
          4. Actual contributions made to the plan should be sufficient to cover the normal cost and to amortize the unfunded actuarial accrued liability over as brief a period as possible, but not to exceed 30 years, with 10 – 25 years being the preferable target range.* For plans that use multiple amortization layers, the weighted average of all amortization periods should not exceed 30 years.* Benefit increases should not be adopted if all plan changes being considered cause a material increase in the amortization period and if the resulting amortization period exceeds 25 years.
          5. The choice of assumptions should be reasonable, and should comply with applicable actuarial standards.
          6. Retirement systems should monitor, review, and report the impact of actual plan experience on actuarial assumptions at least once every five years.


*Plans with amortization periods that exceed 30 years as of 06/30/2017 should seek to reduce their amortization period to 30 years or less as soon as practicable, but not later than 06/30/2025.