California’s public safety union representatives say the state is facing a staffing crisis. They argue that a crucial 2012 law, the Public Employees’ Pension Reform Act, or PEPRA, created an inequitable system in which police officers and firefighters doing the same work receive different retirement benefits depending on when they were hired. That disparity, they contend, has weakened recruitment, driven experienced employees away, increased overtime and burnout, and contributed to longer emergency-response times.
The solution, the unions say, is Assembly Bill 1383 (AB 1383), which passed the House 70–2 and is now awaiting consideration by the Senate Appropriations Committee. It proposes reversing some of the PEPRA reforms for public safety employees, namely lowering the minimum full-benefit retirement age from 57 to 55 and raising the pension compensation cap, the maximum salary used to calculate pension benefits.
However, their claims don’t add up. California’s public safety workforce data does not reflect the unions’ staffing concerns. Based on available data, yearly turnover rates have been stable, median tenure has risen, and overall public safety staffing per capita is within its normal historical range. There is no staffing crisis. In reality, Assembly Bill 1383 was designed to direct more money to the state’s highest-paid public safety employees.
“The [Alleged] PEPRA Problem”
PEPRA was a modest but important reform that made pension benefits in California more affordable and predictable. It limited benefit formulas, raised retirement ages, capped pensionable compensation, required employees to share pension costs, and restricted governments’ ability to grant unfunded benefit increases.
It has saved the state more than $5 billion already and is expected to save more than $25 billion over the next decade.
In the report “The PEPRA Problem: How California’s Pension Reform Created a Public Safety Crisis,” the Peace Officers Research Association of California (PORAC) claims that “PEPRA made it even more difficult to hire for open public safety positions” because it “made the benefits of taking a public safety job less appealing, as they would have to pay more out of their initial paychecks only to work a physically demanding job for longer.”
As evidence, the report primarily cites vacancy rates, which measure the gap between filled positions and the number authorized—or, in some cases, the number an agency or consultant believes is needed. These rates are partly arbitrary because they depend on administratively authorized positions or subjective staffing targets, which can change even if the number of employees does not.
Furthermore, the report presents only current vacancy rates, which range from 9% to 43% among the agencies it highlights, without showing how those rates changed after PEPRA. Without a pre-PEPRA baseline, the figures do not provide evidence that pension reform impacted vacancies.
If “The PEPRA Problem” was as pernicious as first responder unions have led the public to believe, we would see it in rising employee turnover and quit rates and falling median tenure. Instead, the opposite has been observed.
California’s public safety employees are staying longer
Reason Foundation’s previous analysis, which compared available data on California’s public workforce to national data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, found little evidence that California has seen a broad public employee retention crisis after PEPRA. The turnover rate for state and local government employees in California averaged 7.1% between 2016 and 2023, while the national average is 20%. California’s voluntary quit rate—the measure most directly related to retention—averaged about 3%.
Zooming in on public safety shows similar results. Turnover for Bargaining Unit 7, which includes many state law-enforcement employees and is the closest available category to a public safety group, was 7.5% in 2023, compared with an 18.4% turnover rate for noneducation public employees nationwide. In fact, nearly half of separations (48%) were retirements, not quits or dismissals.
Data from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey Job Tenure Supplements also show that California’s public safety employees are not leaving their employers more quickly than they did before the PEPRA reforms.
Among California’s state and local government police officers, firefighters, correctional officers, detectives, and related public safety workers, median tenure with the current employer increased from six years in 1983 to 13 years in 2024. For the same group nationwide, median tenure increased only from seven to nine years over that period.
The annual estimates for California are volatile because the underlying Census sample is modest, but across four decades of survey data, California’s public safety retention has generally been in line with national patterns and, more recently, exceeded the national median.
The tenure composition of the workforce tells the full story. In 1996, 65% of California public safety employees had nine or fewer years with their current employer; by 2024, that share had fallen to 42%. Meanwhile, the share with at least 15 years of tenure increased from approximately 10% to 47%. This suggests the state has gotten better at keeping its talent. The workforce has never been more experienced.
The agencies themselves provide little support that pension benefits are to blame for recruitment hurdles. In a 2025 Public Policy Institute of California survey, agencies were asked to select the top four challenges they faced related to recruiting and hiring. “Agency competition,” “unqualified applicants,” and “pay” were the most-selected recruitment challenges, while “benefits” were named the least, cited by only about one-fifth of respondents.
Despite characterizations of “skeleton crews” in “The PEPRA Problem” brief, the number of police enforcement officers in California per 1,000 residents has been in line with historical standards. From 1985 through 2025, the state averaged 2.02 sworn officers per 1,000 residents; in 2025, the rate was 1.98.
Who really benefits from pension enhancements?
Even where staffing concerns have merit, increasing pension benefits is unlikely to be an effective solution. This is especially true of Assembly Bill 1383, because it immediately benefits only the oldest and best-paid employees, who now represent a larger share of the workforce and tend to have the lowest quit rates.
In fact, the rise in public safety tenure in California may also help explain unions’ priorities. Employees with many years of service are closer to retirement and stand to gain the most from richer benefits. That may create pressure for unions to prioritize pension enhancements over pay increases or improved working conditions—even though those policies are more closely aligned with the recruitment challenges agencies report and would more directly affect newer employees, who are generally at greater risk of quitting.
The costs of this bill would be substantial. Police and fire already represent the largest category of city expenses in California, which is typical nationwide. Reason Foundation’s 30-year actuarial modeling estimates that AB 1383 would increase employer pension costs by $9.3 billion under CalPERS’ baseline investment-return path. Under a scenario incorporating a typical number of recessions and market downturns, the additional costs rise to $14.5 billion through higher contributions and unfunded liabilities. About 86% of the bill’s additional costs come from raising the cap on pensionable compensation.
Available evidence suggests that California’s public safety employees are staying longer than ever. Lawmakers should not impose billions of dollars in new pension costs on local governments and their taxpayers based on claims of a workforce crisis that the data do not support. Where genuine staffing problems exist, policymakers should examine pay, job requirements, working conditions, hiring bureaucracy, and whether predetermined staffing targets reflect actual service demands. Richer public pensions are not the answer.