A record 30,772 public employees retired last year, fueled by an early retirement incentive and the general age of the state workforce, officials said.

The new retirees include workers from state and local governments covered in the annual financial report for the state and local retirement fund administered by Comptroller Tom DiNapoli.

The figures are 26 percent higher than the previous record year, 2002, when 24,371 people retired, the DiNapoli report said.

About 12,000 retirements came from an early retirement incentive offered by Gov. David Paterson in 2010, which gave extra service credit and also cut the number of years needed to retire penalty-free above age 55. According to Morris Peters, a Division of the Budget spokesman, 6,427 people who took the incentive were state employees.

“It’s a mixed bag. There’s a short-term savings, but there is a loss of seniority and experience,” said E.J. McMahon of the conservative think tank the Empire Center. “The ultimate problem from the standpoint of the state is collective bargaining and civil service doesn’t allow it to realign priorities. A drop in staff exposes that problem.”

The report found this was only part of the picture: “Unlike previous incentives, however,” wrote Executive Deputy Comptroller Kevin Murray, “retirement applications continue to be filed at the same rapid rate as during the incentive.”

Retirees form 36 percent of the pension system, up from 27 percent in 1991. The number of pensioners is growing faster than the number of workers paying in, due to hiring freezes and other cutbacks. The situations are rare and may be unprecedented, DiNapoli spokesman Eric Sumberg said.

The state pension fund — valued at $149.5 billion at the end of March — is not strained by the retirements, Sumberg said….

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