Today's pension plans: how much do they pay?, (EXCERPT), Monthly Labor Review Online, December 1985

Today's pension plans:
how much do they pay?

Donald G. Schmitt

Under pension plans of medium and large firms, employees retiring on January 1, 1984, at age 65 after 30 years of service would have received monthly pensions averaging from $385 for those earning $15,000 in 1983 to $886 for those earning $40,000. The corresponding range for employees retiring after 20 years of service was $263 to $623. Social Security benefits, however, would significantly raise these levels of retirement income.

These data were calculated from benefit formulas of 832 pension plans in the 1984 Bureau of Labor Statistics survey of employee benefit plans.¹ The annual study covers the United States (excluding Alaska and Hawaii) and private industry establishments employing at least 50, 100, or 250 workers, depending on the industry. The 1984 survey sample consisted of 1,499 establishments, designed to statistically represent 21 million employees in 45,000 establishments.²

This excerpt is from an article published in the December 1985 issue of the Monthly Labor Review. The full text of the article is available in Adobe Acrobat's Portable Document Format (PDF). See How to view a PDF file for more information.

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Footnotes

1 See, for example, Employee Benefits in Medium and Large Firms, 1984.

2 Such data were developed in the Bureau's survey of employer expenditures for employee compensation, which has been discontinued. See, for example, Employee Compensation in the Private Nonfarm Economy, 1977, Summary 80-5 (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1980).

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