Governor Hochul and state lawmakers this year approved a costly giveaway for public employee unions that retroactively hiked pension benefits for employees hired since 2012. Now the bill is arriving.

State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli, the sole trustee of the New York State and Local Retirement System (NYSLRS), this week announced contribution rates assessed on local governments, school districts and state agencies will rise in the fiscal year beginning next April.

For members of the NYSLRS Employees’ Retirement System (public employees outside New York City who aren’t teachers, police or firefighters, ERS for short), employer contributions will go from an average of 15.2 percent of pay to 16.5 percent. For non-NYC police and firefighters in the Police & Fire Retirement System (PFRS), agencies and municipalities will pay the equivalent of 33.7 percent, up from 31.2 percent this year.

To put those amounts in perspective, the most recent analysis by investment outfit Vanguard estimates that private-sector employer contributions toward 401k retirement accounts—among those employers who match—average 4.6 percent of pay.

The mandatory NYSLRS contributions are based on how NYSLRS investments have been performing, how long retirees are living and how much current workers are making, among other things.

But plan actuaries noted that a large portion of the increase—almost half—was driven by “benefit improvements.” A provision in the state budget—which Senate Republicans noisily supported—changed how pensions are calculated for “Tier 6,” employees hired since 2012. Instead of reflecting their final average salary (FAS, a term of art) over five years, their pensions will instead be based on a three-year average, pushing future payments higher.

If Albany hadn’t made the change, employers would next year be paying an average of 16.0 percent instead of 16.5 percent, and PFRS contributions also would have been lower: about 32.9 percent instead of 33.7 percent. (A related note: state and local government PFRS costs next year will be the highest since 1980).

Put another way: the extra 0.5 percent pension ERS contribution and extra 0.8 percent PFRS contribution will together cost taxpayers about $180 million more annually—and it doesn’t include comparable increases set to hit New York City taxpayers or local school districts, whose teachers also had their pensions sweetened.

This is only the beginning: public employee union officials agitating for further rollbacks of the 2009 and 2012 pension reforms have indicated that their ultimate goal—”the next big reform” they want to focus on—is to restore a provision that allowed employees to retire with full pensions at age 55, a move that would slam taxpayers with upwards of $100 billion in new costs.