The goal of Teacherpensions.org is to provide high-quality information to help stakeholders – especially teachers and policymakers – understand teacher retirement benefits and the trade-offs among various options.
As such, we’ve created simple explainers of how teacher retirement benefits work in your state. Click on the links below to find answers to your questions on how benefits work, who qualifies for them, and how much they cost:
If you’re interested in how the teacher retirement plan in your state compares to other states, check out our report attempting to rank states based on two questions: 1. Are all teachers earning sufficient retirement benefits? And 2. Can teachers take their retirement benefits with them no matter where life takes them?
While we recognize there are multiple ways to grade and sort retirement plans, our grades acknowledge that states might need to employ different policies to meet the needs of their unique situations.
What we found is mostly a depressing picture: States have set up expensive, debt-ridden retirement systems where most teachers fail to qualify for decent retirement benefits. Without dramatic reforms, they’ll continue to fail teachers and leave in place unfair, unsound retirement systems.
Click on a state above to learn more about its specific system, or click here to read our rankings report.