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- State Rep. Randy Rushing said lawmakers are working “to make sure that the PERS system is around for many, many years to come.”
The House Select Committee appointed by Speaker Jason White (R) to consider ways to financially shore up Mississippi’s Public Employees Retirement System (PERS) met Monday as lawmakers prepare for the 2026 legislative session.
Committee co-chair State Rep. Randy Rushing (R) said retirees have no need to worry.
“If anything, be happy we’re having these meeting,” Rushing said. “Because that is strictly just to make sure that the PERS system is around for many, many years to come.”
Speaker White has said the system isn’t “going broke next year,” but he has expressed concern as to what PERS will look life 10, 20, or 30 years. That is what led him to appoint the committee as his chamber continues evaluating opportunities that stabilize and secure Mississippi’s commitment to current and future state retirees.
Ray Higgins, executive director of PERS, said legislators should continue to work on narrowing the nearly $26 billion gap in unfunded accrued liabilities. He said if the system was 80 percent funded, instead of slightly more than half, state employees and retirees would not be worried.
“We would all feel a lot better, and we’d be having different conversations. But it’s important to be aiming for the full funding because you never know what’s going to happen,” he told House members.
For several sessions, House lawmakers have proposed various solutions that could provide a dedicated funding stream for PERS. Last session, there was talk in the House about using receipts from online gaming to help close the gap, but that proposal ran into stiff opposition in the Senate. The opposition struck Speaker White as odd.
“If mobile sports betting is the terrible, awful thing that the Senate says it is, well, I don’t really know what they say, because they just killed the bill quietly in committee without so much as a conversation. Whatever their reason is, if that’s not the thing, what is the thing?” White said during the past session.
In Monday’s meeting, House committee members heard testimony from consultants who agreed Mississippi needs to pipe more money into PERS.
Paul Wood, senior consultant and actuary with GRS Consulting, who said in the next decade PERS could be a financial albatross for Mississippi.
“Based upon the current contributions, there’s little to no expectation that the unfunded accrued liabilities are going to go down at all in the next 20 years,” he said, adding that the liability will stay at $26 billion.
“And then when we get all the way to the end of that, we still have roughly $10 billion left in unfunded liability,” Wood projected.
At the end of the meeting, Rep. Rushing said the Magnolia State needs to continue putting more funds into the system “each year to prop it up.”
“Right now, our contributions from our employees and our employers are not meeting what we need at home when they’re over there writing the checks every month and every year for the 13th check,” Rushing said.
Lawmakers in the two chambers did agree to create a new Tier 5 in PERS during the 2025 session, a move that has drawn criticism from certain segments of public employees, namely those in the law enforcement community. House and Senate members said at the time that the new tier was aimed at financially shoring up PERS while not impacting the current beneficiaries in the system.
The new tier is a hybrid of a defined benefit pension plan and a defined contribution plan. State employees hired into PERS-covered positions starting March 1, 2026, or later will be entered into the new tier. Those in the tier will pay a mandatory 9 percent of salary – 4 percent into the defined benefit plan and 5 percent into the defined contribution plan. Vesting in this tier requires eight years of service.
The PERS Defined Contribution and Investment Committee is meeting at 11 a.m. on Tuesday. On Wednesday, PERS’ Claims, Administrative and Legislative Committee is meeting at 11 a.m. and the Board of Trustees is holding its meeting at 2 p.m.
The House Select Committee on PERS did not announce when its next meeting will be this fall.
