Is the PG&E Pension at Risk?

What PG&E employees should know about wildfire liability, bankruptcy, and the financial health of the pension plan

If you've spent 20, 30, or even more years at PG&E, your pension may well be one of the most valuable assets you own, so it's completely reasonable to stop for a second and ask a hard question:is my PG&E pension safe?

For a ton of PG&E employees, that question comes from a lived experience. You’ve watched the company deal with devastating wildfires, billions of dollars of claims, lawsuits, regulatory challenges, and even bankruptcy.

In January 2019, PG&E Corporation and Pacific Gas and Electric Company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The 2017 Northern California wildfires and the 2018 Camp Fire were major contributors to that decision. At the time, PG&E faced extraordinary potential wildfire liabilities.

If your retirement depends partly on a pension check from PG&E, watching your employer enter bankruptcy is enough to make anyone nervous (for many obvious reasons).

But there’s an important distinction that often gets lost in all of this.

The financial condition of PG&E and the financial condition of the PG&E pension plan are related, but they’re not the same thing.

When we take a look at the pension filings, the picture is considerably more reassuring than many employees might expect.

Let’s Start With What Happened in 2019

The best way to understand the risk today is to start with what PG&E has already been through.

What the company faced went far beyond a bad quarter or a temporary dip in its stock price. As mentioned, PG&E filed for Chapter 11 following catastrophic wildfires and enormous claims.

Its 2019 financial filings discussed agreements intended to settle pre-bankruptcy wildfire liabilities associated with the 2017 Northern California wildfires, the 2018 Camp Fire and other fires for an aggregate $25.5 billion.

As we all know, that’s a pretty serious financial event.

But yet something particularly relevant happened during the bankruptcy process. PG&E's proposed reorganization contemplated assuming its pension obligations, along with other employee obligations and collective bargaining agreements.

To put it another way, PG&E went through the very event many employees fear: bankruptcy following enormous wildfire liabilities and the pension was still standing afterward.

Of course, a pension can still run into financial problems down the road, but that history gives you an important real-world stress test to work from.

Your Pension Isn't Just an IOU Sitting on PG&E's Balance Sheet

One of the biggest misconceptions about pensions is that the employer simply promises to write checks decades into the future, and hope the money is there when the time comes.

A qualified defined-benefit pension works a little differently, though. PG&E's Retirement Plan has a trust containing assets specifically associated with providing plan benefits. 

The company's 2024 Form 5500 identifies the Pacific Gas and Electric Company Retirement Plan as a single-employer pension plan and shows that its benefits are funded through a trust.

The plan's own financial statements provide some perspective on its size.

At the end of 2024, the Retirement Plan reported approximately $17.0 billion of net assets available for benefits. During 2024 it paid approximately $949 million in benefits to participants while PG&E made approximately $327 million of employer contributions to the plan.

That distinction is more important than you might think.

When your pension check arrives, PG&E isn't starting from zero and figuring out how to find the money that month. It’s coming from a large pool of pension assets supporting the benefits promised to you under the plan.

How Well Funded Is the PG&E Pension?

The funding behind the PG&E Pension is where things can start to get particularly interesting.

The Retirement Plan's financial statements say:

“The funding requirements under ERISA were met for the 2024 and 2023 plan years.”

Even more important, the filing says the plan was approximately 20% overfunded on an ERISA funding basis as of January 1, 2024, compared with approximately 18% overfunded one year earlier.

The plan also reports that PG&E and the Utility contributed approximately $327 million in both 2023 and 2024.

The actuarial filing gives you another way to measure it.

The 2024 Schedule SB reports a Funding Target Attainment Percentage of 123.12%. If you haven’t come across it before, Schedule SB is the actuarial filing used for single-employer defined-benefit plans and contains information about plan assets, funding targets and compliance with federal funding requirements.

That doesn’t mean your pension is “123% guaranteed,” nor does it mean its financial condition can never start to deteriorate. Pension funding calculations depend upon actuarial assumptions, interest rates, asset values and federal funding rules.

Still, it can be hard to look at a pension reporting a 123.12% funding target attainment percentage and conclude that the plan is presently in obvious financial distress.

Rather, it’s seemingly quite the opposite.

Why Have You Seen a Different Number?

If you’ve been doing some digging of your own, you may have occasionally seen another number associated with PG&E's pension funding.

For example, PG&E's 2025 corporate financial statements reported pension plan assets of approximately $17.863 billion against a projected benefit obligation of approximately $18.423 billion. That works out to roughly 97% on that accounting basis.

So, is the pension 97% funded or 123% funded?

The answer to that, as annoying as it sounds, is potentially both, because we're measuring two different things.

The roughly 97% figure compares the fair value of pension assets with the projected benefit obligation used for corporate financial accounting. The 123.12% number comes from the pension's ERISA actuarial funding calculation.

Different rules, discount rates and assumptions apply.

This is why I’d be careful about taking one pension number from an annual report and declaring a plan either “safe” or “unsafe.”

Before you start drawing any conclusions, you need to understand what’s being measured.

What About Another Major Wildfire?

The headline above is probably the question underneath the question.

What happens to my pension if PG&E faces another massive wildfire judgment?

I’d love to sit here and tell you the risk is 0%, but there’s no responsible way to say that.

PG&E itself continues to identify wildfire liability as a material financial risk. Its 2025 Annual Report says liabilities from future wildfires could exceed insurance or other available recoveries. It also discusses potential recovery mechanisms through California's Wildfire Fund, the Continuation Account and rates, while making clear that those mechanisms come with uncertainties.

Now pause for a second, because that’s worth taking seriously.

But California's post-2019 framework is also different from the environment immediately preceding PG&E's bankruptcy. PG&E participates in the state's Wildfire Fund, which may reimburse qualifying wildfire claims above specified thresholds, subject to the applicable rules and limitations. PG&E's filings show the company has already recorded recoveries associated with the 2021 Dixie Fire through that mechanism.

The Wildfire Fund comes with limits, and it doesn't eliminate PG&E's wildfire risk. It shouldn't be presented as an unlimited insurance policy. It does, however, change the financial framework surrounding catastrophic wildfire liabilities.

What If PG&E Went Bankrupt Again?

IF PG&E goes bankrupt again, we’ll have to look to the history. It just so happens to provide some useful perspective.

Bankruptcy and the disappearance of a pension plan are separate events, and one can happen without the other, which is exactly what we saw firsthand with PG&E's 2019 bankruptcy. 

More broadly, qualified private-sector defined-benefit pension plans operate under ERISA's funding rules, and single-employer defined-benefit plans generally operate within a federal pension-insurance framework administered by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, subject to applicable coverage rules and statutory benefit limits.

The PG&E filing itself contains another rather useful clue: its actuarial materials specifically discuss PBGC variable-rate premiums and PBGC funding calculations. That’s consistent with the plan operating within the PBGC framework.

If in the back of your mind, you’ve had the worry that  “PG&E goes bankrupt = my entire pension goes to zero,” then you’re thinking about it in too simple of terms.

Bankruptcy, pension-plan termination and loss of pension benefits are separate issues, and it helps to keep them apart in your head.

There Are Still Risks

None of this means I would tell a PG&E employee, not to worry about their pension. That’s a bit too broad of a promise.

Pensions have investment risk, interest rates affect liability calculations, actuarial assumptions change, future contributions matter, employers can amend plans within the boundaries of pension law and plan documents, and PG&E continues to operate in an environment where wildfire, regulatory and financial risks are a very real possibility.

There’s another subtle point in the 2024 actuarial filing worth taking a look at.

The Schedule SB explains that its ERISA funding calculations use interest-rate stabilization provisions permitted under federal law. It specifically notes that these rates can differ from current market interest rates. So the 123.12% figure is a legitimate federal pension-funding measure, but it shouldn’t be confused with a simple market-value calculation of assets divided by liabilities.

That's precisely why I’d look at the whole picture instead of  hanging the entire argument on one percentage.

Right now, that picture includes a large pension trust, compliance with ERISA funding requirements, continued employer contributions, an ERISA funding surplus in the latest detailed pension filing we have reviewed, and the fact that the pension survived PG&E's prior Chapter 11 restructuring.

The Risk I Would Spend More Time Thinking About

For a ton of PG&E employees approaching retirement, I'd move "Will my pension disappear?" down from the top of your retirement planning list and spend a much more considerable amount of time on questions you can control, like:

When should you retire?

When should you start the pension?

How much does starting early reduce your monthly benefit?

Should you choose Single Life, Joint & Survivor or a Pop-Up option?

If you're married, how much income would your spouse need, if you passed first?

How does your pension coordinate with your PG&E 401(k), Social Security, RMSA and other savings?

And perhaps most importantly: What happens to the rest of your financial plan if you make the wrong pension decision?

A pension decision can be permanent, and for someone who’s spent 25 or 30 years at PG&E, the difference between retirement dates or payment options can potentially affect hundreds of thousands of dollars of lifetime income.

That's a risk worthy of paying attention to.

So, Is the PG&E Pension at Risk?

Every pension carries risk, and PG&E has a history that gives employees pretty good reasons to ask the question.

But based on the financial information currently available, I don't necessarily see evidence that the PG&E Retirement Plan is presently in any serious financial trouble.

The strongest evidence comes straight from the pension's own federal filing.

As of January 1, 2024, the plan reported being approximately 20% overfunded on an ERISA funding basis, and its Schedule SB reported a 123.12% Funding Target Attainment Percentage. PG&E continued making hundreds of millions of dollars of pension contributions, and the plan reported meeting its ERISA funding requirements.

PG&E's more recent 2025 corporate financial statements likewise state that its pension benefits met all ERISA funding requirements and that PG&E expected approximately $327 million of contributions to the qualified pension plan in 2026.

The pension still carries risk, but those numbers go a long way toward putting that risk in perspective.

PG&E employees have already lived through wildfires, enormous legal claims and a Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and those events are exactly why asking about the pension is reasonable.

But the available evidence doesn't tell me that employees should be making retirement decisions out of fear that their PG&E pension is about to disappear.

A better approach is to understand what you've earned, understand the choices available to you, and build the rest of your retirement plan around those benefits rather than around headlines.

This article is for educational purposes only. Pension benefits, funding levels and plan provisions can change. Your individual benefits depend on your plan, employment history, retirement date and elections. Review your current PG&E pension estimate and applicable plan documents before making retirement decisions.