Taxpayer ledger · Six states, thirty-six plans
Thirty-six public retirement plans across Colorado, Idaho, Oregon, Florida, California and Illinois, on one axis, each with its measurement date and asset basis attached. The distance from the bottom of this chart to the top is the distance between a plan that can pay and one that cannot.
Sorted worst funded to best. Colour marks the state, and every row is also labelled, so nothing depends on telling two colours apart.
Axis runs 0 to 110%. Bars are drawn to scale from the printed ratio, not estimated. One plan is off this chart: Idaho’s Firefighters’ Retirement Fund is 220.1% funded, a $276.9 million surplus, at 1 July 2025. It is closed, has had no active members since 2021, and is winding down in surplus.
The bottom of the ladder is not an abstraction. It has a bill attached, and Chicago publishes it plainly.
Both numbers are true and they answer different questions. 76.0% is the share of the levy the city itself controls. 19.4% is the share of the bill that lands on the household, because a Chicago property tax bill also carries the Board of Education, the school building fund, Cook County, the Forest Preserve, the water reclamation district, the Park District and City Colleges. Quote the first and a reader hears the second, which is why both belong on the page.
The 2026 appropriation to the four funds is $2,899,698,491, of which $2,843,221,414 is for pension purposes and $56,477,077 is a provision for loss in collection of taxes rather than money paid to the retirement systems. That $2.9 billion is 22.4% of the $12.97 billion net local funds total and 46.4% of the Corporate Fund. A separate and much smaller figure, $907,784,727, is what the Corporate Fund alone appropriates for pensions, and that is the 14.5%.
One detail that says more than any ratio: the pension levy has been frozen near $1.412 billion for five consecutive budgets, 2022 through 2026, while the total levy grew. The share fell from 79.6% to 76.0% not because pensions got cheaper but because the rest of the levy got bigger.
Chicago’s four funds sit at 25.25%, 26.44%, 28.18% and 44.10% funded. Illinois’s five state systems sit at 47.4% combined with a $144.5 billion unfunded liability. The state’s own fiscal commission attributes the growth since 1996 principally to employer contributions that were actuarially insufficient by design.
The reason none of it can be fixed by reducing benefits is written into the state constitution: Article XIII, Section 5 protects accrued pension benefits, and the Illinois Supreme Court struck down a reform act on that basis in 2015. Illinois can change what it pays in, and cannot change what it owes out.
Police and fire pensions are the ones that get written about. In three of these cities they are the healthy plans and the civilian plan is the problem.
| City | Public safety plan | Funded | General employee plan | Funded |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Los Angeles | LAFPP | 100.50% | LACERS | 74.60% |
| Tampa | Fire and Police | 96.42% | General Employees | 87.57% |
| St Petersburg | Firefighters | 102.91% | Employees | 89.01% |
| Chicago | Police / Fire | 26.44% / 25.25% | Municipal | 28.18% |
Los Angeles is the solid case. Both plans are valued by the same actuary at the same 30 June 2025 date on the same basis. LAFPP retirement is 100.5% funded with a surplus; LACERS retirement is 74.60% with a $7.0 billion hole.
Even there, quote it carefully. 100.5% is the retirement benefit alone. LAFPP also runs a retiree health subsidy that is 78.1% funded with a $961 million shortfall, so the combined plan is 97.6%, still far ahead of LACERS but not in surplus.
Tampa does not survive the same test and I am withdrawing it as evidence. Its fire and police ratio of 96.42% is measured at 30 September 2024 using an 8.50% discount rate. Its general employees ratio of 87.57% is measured a year later at 30 September 2025 using 7.00%. Different dates and a 1.5 point difference in the assumption that drives the whole calculation. A higher discount rate makes a plan look better funded, so that pair cannot carry the argument.
And the pattern is not uniform anyway. St Petersburg’s police plan at 86.49% sits slightly below its general employee plan. Chicago inverts it completely, with police and fire at the very bottom of the ladder.
One structural reason does apply in Florida and nowhere else here. Under Chapters 175 and 185 the state taxes insurance premiums written inside a municipality and hands the proceeds to that city’s fire and police pension plans. It is two separate taxes on two different lines of insurance at two different rates, not one uniform levy, and it gives those plans a funding stream the civilian plan does not have.
The third is Idaho’s Firefighters’ Retirement Fund at 220.1%. A surplus that large is not skill, it is a closed plan with no active members since 2021 running out its remaining obligations against assets that outlived them.
All three are reminders that a funded ratio is a measurement, not a verdict. What it means depends entirely on what the plan was built to do.
Across six states the pattern is not about generosity of benefits, and it is not about which party runs the place. It is about three things.
| Idaho PERSI | Illinois systems | |
|---|---|---|
| Funded | 90.89% | 47.4% |
| Unfunded liability | $2.42bn | $144.5bn |
| Amortisation period | 8.2 years, against a 25 year statutory ceiling | a statutory ramp that funds less than the actuarial cost |
| Can benefits be adjusted | Contribution rates set by the board | Accrued benefits constitutionally protected |
| Social Security | Members participate | Members of several systems do not |
Paying the actuarial cost. Idaho pays its shortfall down in 8.2 years against a 25 year legal maximum. Illinois has a statutory contribution that is knowingly less than the actuarially determined one, and its own fiscal commission names that as the largest single driver of the hole.
Keeping the promise adjustable somewhere. Every well funded plan here has a valve: a board that can move contribution rates, a COLA that flexes with funded status, or a cost of living increase that was never guaranteed in the first place. Illinois has none, by constitutional design.
Not borrowing the ratio. Oregon’s four point improvement comes from side accounts. Where an employer funded one with pension obligation bonds, the money was borrowed, and the debt did not disappear, it moved.