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S&P Says Pension Funding Down in February, But Slide Slows

Standard & Poors reported on March 3 that pension funding for the S&P 1500 and S&P 500 fell in February. But there was some good news: the drop was much less than during the previous month.

Companies in the S&P 1500 saw their pension funding drop by 1% in February to 78%; funding for those in the S&P 500 fell by even less, 0.4%, Mercer reports. The pension funding deficit for the S&P 1500 was $487 billion by the end of February, up from $472 billion at the end of January.

While the funded status fell for both groups, the drop was much smaller than those that took place in January. Pension funding for the S&P fell by 3% — three times as much — in January; for the S&P 500, it fell by 5.1% in January, almost 13 times the drop in February.