The number of retirees eligible for $200,000 or more in pensions from the New York State and Local Retirement System (NYSLRS) reached 78 in the 2024 fiscal year, according to new data posted on SeeThroughNY.net, the Empire Center’s government transparency website.
The list of NYSLRS retirees with the highest pensions is dominated by public hospital administrators and police officers. Seventeen retired from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and another fifteen retired from the Suffolk County Police Department.
The top maximum pension in 2023 went to Kara C. Bennorth Hubertus, a former Executive Vice President at the Westchester Health Care Corporation, who was eligible to collect an annual retirement benefit of $503,128—the highest reported by the system since the Empire Center started posting NYSLRS pension data at SeeThroughNY in 2008. In 2022, her last full year of active employment, Westchester Health Care paid Bennorth Hubertus a total of $761,660, according to SeeThroughNY.net’s salary database.
The next-highest pensions went to:
- Dr. Shashikant B. Lele, Roswell Park Cancer Institute, $437,778
- Richard J. Batista, Nassau Health Care Corp., $339,874
- Paul E. Scott, Nassau Health Care Corp., $329,369
- Brian M. Murray, Erie County Medical Center Corp., $327,322
Federal law caps defined benefit pensions at $275,000 a year, but the limit does not apply to individuals who joined a retirement system before April 1, 1996.
Among the 13,234 state pension system members who were newly retired after at least 20 years of service in 2023, 1,359 were enrolled in the Police and Fire Retirement System (PFRS) and were eligible for an average maximum pensions of $94,558, reflecting New York’s generally high police pay levels swollen by overtime. New retirees from the state’s Employees Retirement System (ERS) qualified for average pensions of $44,101. Six out of the ten new retirees receiving six-figure pensions were from PFRS.
The updated NYSLRS pension data set at SeeThroughNY.net includes names and allowable pension amounts for 472,922 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 2024 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.
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