A teaching assistant and a teacher aide can spend the same morning in the same classroom with the same children. Their pensions are billed to the district by two separate retirement systems, at two very different prices.

State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli set the rates for the New York State and Local Retirement System on September 8, covering state fiscal year 2027-28. Average employer contributions to the Employees' Retirement System fall from 17.6 percent of payroll to 17.3 percent. The Police and Fire Retirement System moves the other way, climbing from 36.5 percent to 37.4 percent. Invoices come due February 1, 2028, and employers who pay by December 15, 2027 receive a discount.

For a school district, only one of those numbers touches the payroll, and it covers the staff who are not teachers. The teaching side pays a separate bill to the New York State Teachers' Retirement System, where the rate applied to 2026-27 salaries is 8.24 percent, down from 9.59 percent the year before. Both payments land inside the same district fiscal year, which makes 2027-28 an unusual build: two pension rates falling at once, in a state where they have mostly done the opposite.

The decrease on the ERS side is modest at three tenths of a point. It lands on a rate that climbed from 13.1 percent in state fiscal year 2023-24 to 15.2 percent, then 16.5 percent, then 17.6 percent. What carries more weight in a business office is which employees the rate reaches, and what Albany changed underneath it.

Membership is decided by civil service classification rather than by where someone sits during the school day. Under the NYSTRS employer manual, teachers, substitute teachers, superintendents, business administrators, guidance counselors, nurse teachers and teaching assistants hold unclassified positions and are eligible for the Teachers' Retirement System only. Business managers, school nurses, teacher aides and other non-instructional titles are classified, and they are eligible for NYSLRS only.

Teaching assistants report to TRS while teacher aides report to ERS, and the same split separates a business administrator from a business manager and a nurse teacher from a school nurse. Custodians, bus drivers, cafeteria workers and clerical staff all sit on the ERS side of that line.

Run the two rates against each other and the distance is the part worth flagging to a board. At 17.3 percent of payroll, a district pays more than double the 8.24 percent owed on teaching salaries, and the gap grew this year instead of closing. The two rates sat about eight points apart last cycle and sit about nine points apart next cycle, because TRS came down by more than a full point while ERS gave back three tenths.

Two separately funded systems, with their own benefit structures, actuarial assumptions and member populations, will not land on the same rate. The consequence shows up in a staffing decision, where a district weighing an aide line against a teaching assistant line faces a pension charge roughly twice as high on one of them. Those two salary lines often sit within a few thousand dollars of each other.

The Comptroller's office attributes rate changes to investment performance, salary growth, the plan options employers have adopted, member retirement patterns, and recent legislative reforms to Tiers 5 and 6. By any measure an auditor would apply, the fund behind those rates is in strong shape. NYSLRS reported a funded ratio of 96.8 percent as of March 31, 2026, and the Common Retirement Fund was valued at $309.7 billion on June 30. The system paid more than $17.5 billion in benefits during the fiscal year that ended in March.

The fund also holds a long-term assumed rate of return of 5.9 percent, well under the 7 percent median the National Association of State Retirement Administrators recorded for public plans in July 2026. A lower assumption produces higher employer bills in the near term and fewer surprises later, a trade DiNapoli has defended for most of his tenure. Announcing the new rates, he described the fund as navigating "damaging federal policy changes, market volatility and global conflict".

The legislative piece deserves a closer read from anyone forecasting payroll costs, because the 2026-27 state budget moved money in both directions at once. Effective October 1, 2026, Tier 6 member contribution rates drop across most salary bands. An ERS member earning $58,000 goes from contributing 4.5 percent of pay to 3 percent, and a member earning $90,000 goes from 5.75 percent to 4 percent. The employer rate for 2027-28 came down anyway.

Overtime limits moved as well, and starting January 1, 2027 the overtime that counts toward final average earnings for ERS Tier 5 and 6 members rises to $30,000. The prior limits were $24,070.60 for Tier 5 and $21,589 for Tier 6, and the new ceiling grows 3 percent a year after that. On the police and fire side the change is larger, with the annual limit going from 15 percent of pensionable non-overtime earnings to 25 percent. PFRS employers are the ones absorbing a nine-tenths point increase.

School districts do get a pension exclusion from the property tax levy limit, but it carries a high trigger. The exclusion applies only when the system average contribution rate grows by more than two percentage points in a single year, and only to the growth above that threshold. A rate that falls produces nothing to exclude, and neither does a rate that rises by a point and a half.

The Comptroller's own history of the exclusion shows how seldom it fires. Since the cap took effect, school districts have received an ERS exclusion twice, at 0.60 percent for fiscal years beginning in 2012 and 0.10 percent in 2024. A TRS exclusion has come through once, at 2.41 percent in 2013, and every other year on that table reads no exclusion. Pension cost has been ordinary spending inside the cap in eleven of the fourteen years the table covers, and a falling rate means 2027-28 reads the same way.

Several districts lost budget votes in May only after seeking a cap override and missing the 60 percent supermajority. South Country in Suffolk County lost by the widest margin, where a 13.45 percent proposed levy increase went down 2,747 to 1,105. Savings that stay inside the cap are savings a board can spend without going back to voters for a supermajority.

The 17.3 percent figure is a statewide average across more than 3,000 participating employers and more than 300 retirement plan combinations, so no district will be billed at exactly that number. Each invoice depends on which plans the board has adopted, what salaries the district pays, and how employees are distributed across the six membership tiers.

DiNapoli's office has given employers a two-year projection of their annual pension bills since 2012, and that projection is the figure that belongs in a 2027-28 forecast rather than the statewide average. Districts carrying a large ERS population, particularly those running their own transportation and buildings-and-grounds operations, should expect a projection that diverges from 17.3 percent in one direction or the other.

NYSTRS adopts its employer contribution rate each July and circulates an estimated range the prior fall, so the number for 2027-28 salaries will reach districts while next year's plan is still being assembled. Tier 6 members in the Teachers' Retirement System can now retire without an age reduction at 58 with 30 years of credited service, five years earlier than the previous threshold of 63.