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Guiding Principles

NASRA supports the following guiding principles to retirement security and public plan sustainability:

  • Participation of all relevant stakeholders, including government employers, their plans, their employees, plan beneficiaries and retirees, and other taxpayers in discussions and processes about the design and financing arrangements of public retirement plans

  • Policy-driven decision-making that recognizes the retirement security and workforce management purposes of public employee retirement systems, and which is based on objective and pertinent information that fairly reflects the long-term time horizon and economic effects of public plan financing, benefit adequacy, and benefit distributions

  • Tailored solutions, achieved by affected stakeholders working through the state and local legislative and regulatory processes

  • Retention of core, indispensable elements of public plan design, namely, mandatory participation, shared financing, targeted income replacement, pooled investment and longevity risks, and lifetime benefit payouts

  • Removal of federal policy barriers to the preservation of these central retirement plan design features in the public sector and the adoption of federal policies that encourage their inclusion in the private sector. 

Resolution adopted by NASRA Members, August 11, 2010 and further Amended August 9, 2016. 

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Become A Member

Becoming a member of NASRA offers a unique opportunity to join a community committed to the sound, efficient, and innovative stewardship of public retirement systems. Membership connects you with a network of professionals and experts, providing valuable insights into managing public retirement systems with a focus on sustainability and risk-averse strategies.

By joining NASRA, you gain the tools and resources to enhance the management of public retirement systems, ensuring their long-term success and reliability for generations to come.

What's New at NASRA: Government Spending Issue Brief

NASRA’s March 2026 update on government spending makes a basic but important point: public pension benefits are not paid out of a government’s day-to-day operating budget. They are paid from trust funds that employees and employers contribute to during an employee’s working years. Those trusts distribute more than $400 billion each year to retirees and beneficiaries in communities across the country. On a national basis, employer contributions to pension trusts in FY 2023 equaled 5.16 percent of direct general spending by state and local governments, which shows that pension contributions remain a limited share of overall public spending even though the level varies from one state to another. 
The brief also shows that pension costs should be viewed in the context of the changes governments have made over the past 15 years to strengthen plan funding. Following the 2008–09 market decline, nearly every state and many local governments adjusted contributions, benefits, or both to improve pension sustainability. More recent data show that employer contributions increased from FY 2022 to FY 2023, but pension spending as a share of total government spending remained broadly stable. The updated brief provides FY 2023 figures and also projects the aggregate pension spending rate for FY 2024, offering a useful snapshot of both current costs and the longer funding trend.