Lawmakers set to give more lavish pension benefits to California’s highest-paid workers

California lawmakers seem to be on the verge of passing a costly bill that could add as much as $15 billion to the cost of public pensions for the state’s highest-paid police officers and firefighters. An estimated 86% of taxpayers’ costs will go toward providing additional pension benefits to the state’s highest-paid public safety employees earning more than $160,000.

These pension benefit increases would come through Assembly Bill 1383, which proposes lowering the minimum retirement age for public safety employees to receive a full pension benefit from 57 to 55 and raising the pension compensation cap, which is the maximum salary used to calculate lifetime pension benefits, from $160,000 to $185,000.

Public safety unions don’t want to admit outright that they want taxpayers to fund more lavish benefits for their highest-paid members, so they argue that these increases in retirement benefits are necessary to address recruitment and retention challenges.

The Peace Officers Research Association of California claims that the Public Employees’ Pension Reform Act (PEPRA), implemented in 2013 to rein in the state’s increasingly unaffordable pension benefits and skyrocketing debt, has left “agencies across the state struggling to recruit and retain the firefighters, peace officers, and other first responders that communities depend on.”

But California’s public safety workforce data shows no evidence of a retention crisis. A Reason Foundation analysis found that California’s public safety workforce had a 7.7% turnover rate in 2023, effectively identical to the 7.4% rate across the state’s broader public workforce. The national turnover rate for state and local government employees was much higher, at 18.5% in 2023. Moreover, about half of California’s public safety turnover was due to workers retiring to take their pension benefits, not to resignations or dismissals.

Government agencies’ own survey responses provide little evidence that pension benefits are driving any recruitment difficulties. In a 2025 Public Policy Institute of California survey, agencies were asked to identify the four greatest challenges they faced in recruiting and hiring. “Agency competition,” “unqualified applicants,” and “pay” were the most frequently selected challenges. “Benefits” ranked last, cited by only about one-fifth of respondents.

In fact, California’s public safety workforce is becoming more tenured, not less. In 1996, 65% of public safety employees had nine or fewer years on the job. By 2024, the percentage of workers with less than nine years on the job had fallen to 42%. Meanwhile, the share of California public safety employees with at least 15 years of tenure dramatically rose from about 10% in 1996 to 47% in 2024.

A workforce composed of an unprecedented share of long-serving employees at the top end of the pay scale helps explain why the union is pushing for expensive public pension increases that mostly go to highly paid, long-tenured members, rather than addressing the grievances that might actually improve recruitment and retention in public safety.

AB 1383 is poorly designed to address the workforce problems its supporters claim it is supposed to fix. Employee turnover is only a problem among California’s newest and youngest public safety officers. If policymakers were looking to appeal to those workers, they might propose higher starting salaries, signing bonuses, or other early career sweeteners.

Instead, the pension bill would award additional retirement benefits primarily to employees who are already highly compensated, well into their government careers, and almost certain to remain in their jobs until retirement, even if the state does not increase their benefits.

Police and fire services already represent the largest category of city spending in California. The additional pension costs imposed by AB 1383 would leave cities with less money for staffing, salaries, and other public services or require significant tax increases. Therefore, paradoxically, increasing pension benefits for the highest-paid police officers and firefighters, under the pretense of addressing staffing vacancies, will likely leave some cities with less money to hire new public safety workers.

Assembly Bill 1383 is a taxpayer-funded handout to highly compensated, long-tenured employees that won’t attract or retain the next generation of police officers and firefighters. It’s not too late for lawmakers to avoid repeating history and once again increasing constitutionally guaranteed pension benefits for public workers without a plan to pay for them.

A version of this column first appeared at The Orange County Register.

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