We Need Your Support! The Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy is entirely funded by donations. Without your help, we could not exist. Please consider making a generous contribution today. We are an independent, non-partisan, public policy research and educational organization committed to furthering the goals of economic growth and individual opportunity. It is a [...]

Pension and retirement obligations are the biggest long term problem facing the state. New Hampshire’s four long-term pension and retiree health benefit obligations have current unfunded liabilities of more than $7 billion. Changing the state’s pension and health obligations is no longer optional.

Through the Retirement System, the state administers a pension plan for state and local employees and a retirement health benefit. Those two components have unfunded liabilities of $4.7 billion. In addition, outside of the system there is a much larger health benefit with an unfunded liability of $2.4 billion and a much smaller judicial retirement plan with rapidly eroding funding — $15 million in the hole after just five years.