A total of 132 retirees from the New York State and Local Retirement System (NYSLRS) were eligible to collect $200,000 or more in pensions during the 2026 fiscal year, according to new data posted on SeeThroughNY.net, the Empire Center’s government transparency website.

Among the 132 retirees were public hospital doctors, police officers, psychiatrists, and government administrators. Thirty-seven retired from the Suffolk County Police Department, another 20 from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and 14 from the City of Yonkers.

The 485,775 pensioners of the state’s retirement system were eligible to receive $16.2 billion in pensions during the fiscal year 2025, up twenty percent since 2021 ($13.5 billion). Of these pensioners, 12,968 were eligible to receive more than $100,000.

Like the previous year, the largest eligible pension went to Kara Bennorth, a former communications executive at the Westchester Health Care Corporation, who was eligible to collect $503,128. More than half of that amount came from an excess benefit plan. Bennorth is the first and only person to be eligible for a pension above $500,000 since the Empire Center started collecting the data in 2008.

The next-highest pensions went to:

• Shashikant B. Lele, Roswell Park Cancer Institute, $438,318
• Richard J. Batista, Nassau Health Care Corp., $339,874
• Paul E. Scott, Nassau Health Care Corp., $329,909
• Brian M. Murray, Erie County Medical Center Corp., $327,322

Of the 12,968 newly retired full-career members—defined as those with at least 20 years of service—1,247 were police officers and firefighters in New York’s Police and Fire Retirement System (PFRS), who were eligible for an average pension of $99,723. In contrast, the remaining 11,721 new retirees from the state’s Employees Retirement System (ERS) averaged less than half the PFRS amount, at $48,684.

PFRS members accounted for more than half of all new retirees eligible to receive six-figure pensions, despite representing less than 10 percent of the most recent cohort of NYSLRS pensioners.

Among the 3,478 agencies which include state agencies, public authorities, local counties, towns, villages, school districts, and special districts, the 43 retirees from Hartsdale Fire District Commission were eligible to receive the highest average pay at $109,509, followed by 464 Supreme Court Justice retirees at $106,034.

Nassau County had the largest number of retirees at 11,835, paying out more than $687 million in pensions, followed by Suffolk County ($643 million for 11,264 retirees) and Port Authority of New York and New Jersey ($480 million for 7,157 retirees).

A recent report from the Empire Center used prior-year NYSLRS pension data to identify potential “pension spiking” among New York State and Suffolk County police officers. The analysis found that officers heavily loaded up on overtime just before retirement, which artificially inflated their lifelong payouts, potentially costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.

The full dataset can be found on SeeThroughNY.net. The new data includes names and allowable pension amounts for 485,775 retirees from state agencies, public authorities and local governments as well as non-teaching school district positions. The amounts, which are exempt from state income tax, show what retirees were eligible to collect during the plan’s 2025 fiscal year, which ended March 31.

The Empire Center, based in Albany, is an independent, not-for-profit, non-partisan think tank dedicated to promoting policies that can make New York a better place to live, work and raise a family.