Industry News

On May 7, 2025, the Society of Actuaries (SOA) Research Institute’s Retirement Plans Experience Committee (RPEC) released its report, Pub-2016 Public Retirement Plans Mortality Tables. This report was published in conjunction with the new set of mortality tables for U.S. public pension plans released in January 2025, the Pub-2016 Mortality Tables. These tables update the previous Pub-2010 tables published in 2019. The SOA plans to update the public retirement plan mortality tables approximately every five years.

The new tables are gender-specific and categorized by job type (teachers, public safety personnel and general employees) with further breakdowns based on income (above and below median). Separate tables are provided for employees, retirees, disabled retirees and contingent survivors, each with amount-weighted and head-count weighted versions. Mortality tables for all jobs categories combined were not developed by SOA since each job category has distinct characteristics that could significantly impact mortality rates.

When developing the Pub-2010 tables, RPEC identified that the most significant predictors of mortality differences within gender and job classifications were salary and benefit amounts. As a result, RPEC produced above and below median tables, noting that the impact of these tables is smaller for teachers as compared with public safety or general employees while the impact is larger for males than females among all job categories.

The Pub-2016 Public Retirement Plans Mortality Tables include 58 million life-years of exposure data and 774,000 deaths from 41 public pension systems representing 100 plans in the United States. 

Due to the unknown impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, not all data collected for the calendar year 2020 was included in the study. For systems reporting data on a calendar year basis, the 2020 data was excluded. However, there were many non-calendar-year plans included in the study and the final dataset includes a partial year of exposure in 2020 for these plans. The resulting mortality rates reflect one-year probabilities of death as of July 1, 2016, the midpoint of the experience period.

According to the SOA, the financial impact of implementing the new mortality tables will vary based on each individual job category as well as members’ ages and other demographics in each pension plan. The SOA cautions that plan sponsors should consult with their plan actuaries about using the updated tables in accordance with Actuarial Standards of Practice (ASOP) No. 27, Selection of Assumptions for Measuring Pension Obligations. 

In addition, the report states, “The Committee believes that for most pension-related actuarial applications, the Pub-2016 mortality rates (including those for Disabled Retirees) should be projected with an appropriate mortality improvement scale, and that generational projection should be considered as an approach to projecting future mortality rates. In all cases, the selection of a mortality improvement assumption must satisfy the applicable requirements of ASOP 27.”

In January 2025, the RPEC released an Exposure Draft report of the Pub-2016 Public Retirement Plans Mortality Tables and comments were due by March 31, 2025. Notably, there were no formal comments submitted and no changes were made to the Exposure Draft version of the report or tables.

Currently, Piotr Krekora, Senior Consultant for GRS, serves as a member of the RPEC which developed these tables.

The report is available here.