Essays

State Pension Contributions and Their Impact on State Education Budgets

From 2015 to 2022, state education budgets have increased allocations toward pension contributions. Studying six states using GASB 67 and 68 reports along with data from the NCES database, we observe that average pension contributions increased by more than 40 percent (from 5.27 to 7.47 percent of total education expenditures). States exhibited significant heterogeneity in their allocation changes with Massachusetts’s budget allocation increasing by almost 5 percentage points while Minnesota increased by only 0.4 percentage points.

Tuesday, November 19, 2024 0 min read By:

Joshua D. Rauh,

Gregory Kearney , Research Team: State and Local Governance Initiative ,