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Public Pension Staff: Compensation, Benefits, and Workforce Trends
NCPERS has partnered with CBIZ again to conduct the 2025 Public Pension Compensation Survey (currently underway).
By: Hank Kim, NCPERSNCPERS launched its annual Public Pension Compensation Survey in 2022 to track compensation trends and provide actionable data to guide industry workforce management strategies. At the time, recruiting and retaining skilled talent was a significant challenge, with 63 percent of public pensions indicating this was a problem or was expected to be a problem soon.
Public pensions have made significant progress since then, but recruitment and retention challenges remain. To address these ongoing issues and help public pension professionals navigate an ever-changing and complex human resources landscape, NCPERS launched the HR Roundtable in 2023 and hosted the inaugural Public Pension HR Summit in 2024. Be sure to save the date for the 2025 HR Summit, held September 24-26 in Philadelphia, and sign up here for event updates.
Last year we had another first: NCPERS partnered with CBIZ to execute the 2024 Public Pension Compensation Survey. By joining forces, we were able to dramatically expand the survey to capture compensation and bonus data for more than 80 positions commonly found at public pensions. Following this success, we've partnered with CBIZ again to conduct the 2025 Public Pension Compensation Survey (currently underway).
On April 8, the 2025 survey was distributed to designated contacts at more than 600 public pensions across the U.S. with responses requested by May 13. This year's survey captures compensation and bonus data for 90 positions commonly found at public pensions, as well as details on benefits, fund oversight, compensation philosophy, and salary increase planning. A PDF of the position titles and job summaries captured is available here.
The Public Pension Compensation Survey has become an invaluable tool to help public pensions of all sizes make informed decisions about compensation, benefits, and hiring strategies. Each year, participating organizations get a free copy of the report (a $2,500 value). Participating NCPERS members also receive complimentary access to an interactive dashboard that allows users to filter the data by various criteria—such as region, number of fund staff, or assets under management—enabling them to optimize the mix of funds to which they would like to compare themselves.
By participating in this year's survey your organization will benefit from free access to in-depth data, and the public pension industry benefits from access to an even more robust dataset. If your organization did not receive a copy of the 2025 Public Pension Compensation Survey instrument and is interested in participating, please contact research@ncpers.org. Additional details are available here.
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