Fully Funded

What Is Fully Funded?

Fully funded is a description of a pension plan that has sufficient assets to provide for all the accrued benefits it owes and can thus meet its future obligations.

In order to be fully funded, the plan must be able to make all the anticipated payments to both current and prospective pensioners. A plan's administrator is able to predict the amount of funds that will be needed on a yearly basis. The funding status is generally determined by the plan's outside actuaries. This can help determine the financial health of the pension plan. Fully funded can be contrasted with an underfunded pension, which does not have enough current assets to fund its obligations.

Understanding Fully Funded

Companies distribute annual benefits statements specifying whether or not the pension plan is fully funded. Employees can use this to determine the financial strength of the plan.

A fully funded pension plan is one that has the financial stability to make current and future benefits payments to pensioners. The plan depends on capital contributions and returns on its investments to achieve stability.

A plan's funded status refers to the amount of accumulated assets (out of all assets needed for full funding) that have been set aside for the payment of retirement benefits. The equation to determine a plan’s funded status is:

Funded status = plan assets - projected benefit obligation (PBO)

For example, in July 2019, the CalPERS (California Public Employees’ Retirement System) fund reported a funded status of 70% at the end of the June 30 fiscal year. This was down less than one percentage point from the fiscal year ending on June 30, 2018, according to the plan’s reports. In July 2019, the size of the CalPERS fund was more than $370 billion.

Underfunded pensions are a growing problem as they are unable to meet the pension cash flows promised to current and retired workers. An overfunded plan, on the other hand, is a company retirement plan that has more assets than liabilities. In other words, there is a surplus in the amount of money needed to cover current and future retirements. Although this surplus can legally be recorded as company income, it cannot be paid out to corporate shareholders like other income as it is reserved for current and future retirees.

Fully Funded and the Pension Footnote in Financial Statements

The pension note in a company’s financial statements details the corporate pension plan that management has set for its employees, generally after a particular vesting period. This usually follows after the section on long-term liabilities, since the pension fund is a particular type of long-term liability that is not often captured on the balance sheet. For this reason, pensions are sometimes called off-balance-sheet financing.

Pension fund accounting is complicated, and the footnotes are often tortuous. There are various sorts of pension plans, but the defined benefit (DB) pension plan is one of the most popular. With a defined benefit plan, an employee knows the terms of the benefit that will be received upon retirement. The company is responsible for investing in a fund in order to meet its obligations to the employee, so the company bears the investment risk.

On the other hand, in a defined contribution plan, such as a 401(k), the company may make contributions or matching contributions but does not promise the future benefit to the employee. As such, the employee bears the investment risk.