The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) was established by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 to ensure that participants in defined benefit pension plans receive their pensions if their plans terminate without sufficient assets to pay promised benefits. PBGC administers separate insurance programs to protect participants in single-employer and multiemployer plans.
PBGC has published the Pension Insurance Data Book annually since 1996 to present detailed statistics on PBGC program operations and benefit protection.
This edition of the Pension Insurance Data Book has been expanded and the order of the tables has been revised. Tables related to PBGC’s claims experience have been added to provide more historical data on the number and size of claims by the year the plans terminated, the funding levels in the plans at termination, and the size of the plans at termination. Tables related to people receiving benefits from PBGC have also been added to provide payment data separately for retired participants and beneficiaries of deceased participants. A “table listing key” at the end of this book will assist those familiar with the table numbers in older editions of the Pension Insurance Data Book in finding the relevant table(s) in this edition.
The Data Book tables are available in electronic form on PBGC’s Web site at www.pbgc.gov/publications/databook.