Teacher Pension Funding by State
Every teacher retirement system the Public Plans Database tracks separately, ordered by how much of its promised benefits it has actually set aside.
- Systems tracked
- 33
- States covered
- 25 of 51
- Members covered
- 7,551,079
- Below 80% funded
- 21 of 33
The verdict
Across 33 separately tracked teacher retirement systems in 25 states, funded ratios run from 21.8% (Louisiana Teachers Retirement System) to 108.9% (New York City Educational), and 21 of 33 sit below 80%.
- 76.3%
- Average funded ratio
- 7,551,079
- Members covered
- $510.6B
- Reported unfunded liability
- 25/51
- States with a tracked system
Reported actuarial funded ratios from the Public Plans Database, loaded July 2026. A funded ratio measures money set aside against benefits promised, not how generous those benefits are.
The eight largest teacher systems, by members covered
Ordered by membership rather than by funded ratio, because the systems covering the most teachers are the ones whose funding matters to the most people. Bars show the reported funded ratio.
Every tracked teacher system, best funded first
The change column is the move between FY2023 and FY2024, the most recent pair where a majority of plans report a funded ratio and the figures behind it. A dash means the system did not report both years.
What this page measures, and what it does not
A funded ratio is the money a system has set aside divided by the benefits it has already promised. It is a solvency measure, and it is the only one this dataset supports at the system level.
It is not a measure of how good a teacher pension is to earn. Two systems can report the same funded ratio while promising very different benefits, and a plan can be well funded precisely because its benefits are modest. Anyone comparing states as an employment decision needs the benefit formula, the vesting schedule, the employee contribution rate and whether the state also participates in Social Security, none of which a funded ratio contains.
Funded ratios also rest on each system's own actuarial assumptions, so two systems using different discount rates are not strictly comparable even in the same year. Read a system's own valuation before drawing conclusions about it.
Coverage
This page covers the 33 teacher systems the Public Plans Database tracks separately, in 25 of 51 states. Several states appear more than once, because a state can run a statewide teacher system alongside separate city or county systems. The database is a sample of large US public plans rather than a census of every plan, so a system's absence here does not mean it does not exist.
Every figure on PlainPension is rendered directly from the Public Plans Database (Boston College Center for Retirement Research), no number is typed in by an editor. This page selects the plans the dataset classifies as teacher systems and orders them by reported funded ratio, live from the dataset. See our editorial standards & corrections policy, the typed corrections pathway, the methodology behind these numbers, or report a data error.