BENEFITS DIGEST

PBGC wants more from the multiemployer plans that received special financial assistance, the federal aid that shored up troubled union plans. Segal reports the proposed annual compliance reporting would add governance and investment records and procedures for locating missing participants, with redactions permitted, and it applies only to the plans that received the assistance, which report through 2051. Comments are due December 15. The additional reporting awaits White House paperwork approval, and plans’ existing reporting requirements stay in place.

PBGC’s 2027 flat-rate premiums rise to $116 per participant for single-employer plans and $42 for multiemployer plans. The variable rate remains $52 per $1,000 of unfunded vested benefits, while its per-participant cap rises to $783. The maximum guaranteed benefit for a 65-year-old in a single-employer plan reaches $97,363.68 a year on a single-life annuity. Mercer also explains the separate present-value table used to restrict lump-sum payments from certain underfunded plans.

A multiemployer pension plan will owe PBGC $42 per participant for 2027, up from $40. Morgan Lewis points to the work behind that calculation. Properly resolving small balances and deceased-participant records may reduce the count, but losing contact with someone doesn’t erase the plan’s obligation or justify removing that person. Administrators should distinguish a benefit that has been settled from a participant who simply hasn’t been found.

Receiving special financial assistance from PBGC comes with a long reporting tail. A proposal would expand recipients’ annual submissions through 2051 to include investment policies and meeting minutes, missing-participant procedures and disclosures of criminal violations. Some material could be redacted if enough context remains. For trustees and administrators, the preparation includes keeping governance records that can support those reports. Comments are due December 15; the proposed additions aren’t final requirements yet.

Morgan Lewis notes the PBGC’s October 14 announcement that 2027 premiums for multiemployer pension plans will be a flat $42 per participant, a $2 increase from 2026 and 40% above the level of a decade ago. The firm’s practical points are keeping participant records accurate and identifying deceased participants, which help prevent inflated premium counts, while permissible small-balance cash-outs can reduce the number of participants counted.

On the single-employer side, PLANSPONSOR reports the PBGC’s 2027 guarantee limits rising 4.16%, putting the maximum guaranteed benefit for a 65-year-old retiree at $8,113.64 per month for a benefit paid over the retiree’s lifetime with no survivor payments. The flat-rate premium rises to $116 per participant, the variable rate stays at $52 per $1,000 of unfunded vested benefits under its statutory freeze, and the variable-rate cap reaches $783 per participant. The multiemployer guarantee is not indexed and does not change.

PLANSPONSOR reports PBGC’s [proposal](https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/10/16/2026-21189/proposed-submission-of-information-collection-for-omb-review-comment-request-special-financial) to expand what multiemployer plans that received special financial assistance file with their annual statements of compliance, adding plan investment policies, allocation information, committee documents and relevant meeting records. Segal’s Susan Boyle discusses the practical burden for funds that already file extensively. Comments on the information-collection proposal are due December 15, and the annual statements run through 2051. It is a comment request, not a new investment rule.

PBGC’s rate table now carries 2027 premiums. The single-employer flat rate rises to $116 per participant from $111, the variable-rate premium holds at $52 per $1,000 of unfunded vested benefits, and the per-participant cap on that variable premium rises to $783 from $751. The multiemployer flat rate rises to $42 from $40. Sponsors budgeting 2027 administrative costs can take the figures straight from the table.

Democrats on House Education and Workforce introduced a three-bill retirement package. The Workers’ Retirement Savings Protection Act from Ranking Member Bobby Scott would extend ERISA fiduciary status to one-time advice, including rollover recommendations, reviving concepts from the vacated Retirement Security Rule in statutory form. The Employee and Retiree Access to Justice Act from Rep. DeSaulnier and Sen. Smith would make forced arbitration clauses, class action waivers and representation waivers unenforceable whether signed before or after a dispute, and would ban discretionary clauses outside multiemployer plans so benefit denials get a fresh look in court. The Protecting Workers’ Benefits Act would treat litigation recoveries as plan assets, add a participant incentive award of 0.5 to 1 percent of any recovery, and require consolidation of duplicative suits. The bills lay out House Democrats’ priorities, though their prospects in the current Congress are uncertain.

The Seventh Circuit upheld an Arkansas rule requiring health plans to disclose pharmacy compensation and cover dispensing fees when a pharmacy benefit manager or another intermediary underpays a pharmacy. The multiemployer fund behind Central States v. McClain, suing in Illinois federal court, argued that ERISA preempted the rule. The court concluded that the payment requirement regulates costs and that the reporting requirement does not intrude on the central administration of an employee benefit plan. Self-funded plans operating nationally now have one more state PBM rule the courts have let stand.

Milliman’s midyear study puts aggregate multiemployer pension funding at 106 percent as of June 30, up from 100 percent a year earlier, with 69 percent of plans fully funded and the system holding roughly $55 billion in surplus. The Special Financial Assistance program is a large part of the story: 161 plans have received nearly $78 billion in grants since 2021, which Milliman credits with 9 percentage points of the aggregate funded level. Co-author Tim Connor points to strong markets and contributions that keep outpacing plan costs.

The IRS is clearing out old guidance. Notice 2026-58 declares 71 revenue rulings, revenue procedures, notices, and announcements obsolete under the administration's deregulatory executive orders, the third round in the effort after earlier notices covering 9 and 83 documents. Nothing here repeals a current benefit protection. The listed items are expired or superseded, including Notice 96-8, the 1996 guidance on calculating lump sum distributions from cash balance plans, which Congress superseded in the Pension Protection Act of 2006, and financial-crisis-era funding relief for multiemployer pension plans whose election windows closed years ago. Sponsors with plan documents or procedures that still cite any listed item should confirm what replaced it.

A published Tenth Circuit decision hands boilermaker retirees a win on three fronts. The multiemployer plan paid early retirement benefits to workers who withdrew completely and refrained from jobs classified under collective bargaining agreements, and the trustees read "withdraw completely" to disqualify retirees who took any job with any contributing employer. The court rejected that reading. The plan's language did not disqualify a retiree who took a job, like one at a sporting goods store, outside the union work the plan covers, and giving trustees discretion to interpret the plan did not let them override its clear terms. The court also revived claims that had been dismissed as too late. The plan could not enforce its two-year deadline to sue because its denial letters had not disclosed that deadline. And a denial letter alone did not establish that retirees knew the trustees had breached their duties, a distinction that revived claims for 66 retirees under a separate three-year filing deadline. Every administrator's denial template should state the deadline to file suit.

More than three-quarters of calendar-year multiemployer pension plans surveyed by Segal are in the green zone for 2026, meaning they are not classified as endangered or critical, and counting plans receiving special financial assistance there are more well-funded plans now than in 2008, when zone certifications began. Two federal appeals courts also held this year, in Reichert v. Kellogg and Drummond v. Southern Company Services, that the assumptions used to calculate different pension payment options must be reasonable. Those assumptions can affect how much a retiree receives when choosing, for example, a pension that continues paying a surviving spouse. The courts did not prescribe a single acceptable method. The recap also carries quarter-in-review notes on the Federal Reserve and a short framework for using AI on plan documents and participant communications, with human review of everything AI produces.

PBGC expanded its merger FAQs for multiemployer plans that received special financial assistance, adding examples of the withdrawal liability modifications available to merged building and construction industry plans under its merger regulation. The headline modification lets a merged plan compute a withdrawing employer's share from its share of contributions rather than unfunded vested benefits, which keeps assessments closer to what the rescued plan would have produced on its own and helps show PBGC that a merger won't increase its risk of loss. The agency's worked examples show the stakes: in one scenario the default method zeroes out a $2.5 million assessment that the modification mostly preserves. The update landed the same day as the attrition-event reporting waiver we covered Monday, and the same week a Maryland decision below shows how much can turn on who bears withdrawal liability.

In International Painters and Allied Trades Industry Pension Fund v. Allegion Access Technologies, No. 1:25-cv-02624 (D. Md. Sept. 16, 2026), Judge Brendan A. Hurson dismissed an employer's attempt to pass about $1.9 million in partial withdrawal liability to the union that walked away. After employees voted to deauthorize the union, the union disclaimed the 21-member bargaining unit mid-contract with no advance notice, Allegion stopped contributing, and the fund assessed liability. Allegion sued the union for breach of contract, indemnification, and unjust enrichment, and lost on all three: a union may validly disclaim representation after a deauthorization election, the bargaining agreement contained no indemnification clause, and the contributions went to the fund, a separate entity. Allegion inherited these agreements when it bought the business from Stanley Black & Decker, and the employer couldn't shift the assessment to the union under these agreements. For buyers inheriting union contracts, that's a reason to examine who bears withdrawal liability before signing. The fund's own collection claim awaits a separate summary judgment ruling.

When an employer leaves an underfunded multiemployer pension plan, it owes an exit payment, and an employer that made an earlier partial exit gets a credit for what it already owes. The fight here was over when to subtract that credit. Consumers Concrete left Central States in stages, 2017 and 2019, and the sequencing decides almost everything. Apply the credit early in the statute's four-step calculation, as the fund read it, and the company owes about $607,000 a year for twenty years ($9.3 million in present value). Apply it to the finished number, after the twenty-year payment cap, and the bill could reach zero. Judge Lee, joined by Judges Easterbrook and Ripple, held the credit comes off the finished number, expressly parting with the Eleventh Circuit (whose three judges each called it a hard case) and the Ninth. The PBGC filed an amicus brief supporting that reading, its position since 1985, and no Seventh Circuit judge asked to rehear the case. Employers and funds now face conflicting appellate answers to the same arithmetic, with the agency on the employer's side of the split.

The rest of the opinion behind today's Second Thing. IAC argued in the alternative that the award had to fall because the Fund used inconsistent rates for withdrawal liability and minimum funding. On that point IAC lost: the opinion collects the decisions since the Supreme Court's Concrete Pipe case holding the two rates must be similar, though not necessarily identical. The court also read this year's M&K Employee Solutions decision as support rather than obstacle, noting the Supreme Court's warning about actuaries adopting intentionally low discount rates for withdrawal liability while using higher rates for other purposes. Judgment entered September 15; the recalculation goes back to the arbitrator.

A practical recap of the year's two big withdrawal liability rulings, with the arithmetic that makes them sting. In M&K Employee Solutions, a unanimous Supreme Court held that ERISA does not require the actuarial assumptions behind a withdrawal liability calculation to be locked in by the measurement date. The date fixes the facts, not the assumptions, and the ruling blessed a post-measurement discount rate change that took one employer from $1.8 million to $6.2 million. In Perfection Bakeries, the Eleventh Circuit applied partial withdrawal credits before the 20-year payment cap rather than after, a sequencing question worth about $2 million in that case, and certiorari was denied in April. The advice follows the math. Treat fund estimates as preliminary, watch contribution reductions, since a drop of more than 70 percent can trigger partial withdrawal, and probe assessment-versus-funding rate disparities when challenging an assessment.

The first firm analysis of the suit 22 multiemployer plans filed against the PBGC last week adds the numbers that show what the waitlist costs. The plans represent more than 25,000 participants and estimate they are owed roughly $450 million. Eight are already insolvent and have cut benefits, in some cases by more than half, and three more expect insolvency within a year. Many of the affected retirees are past 75, and because special financial assistance restores benefits only to participants alive when the money arrives, delay does damage no later payment can repair. Jackson Lewis also notes what tilts the eligibility fight. The Supreme Court denied review of the Second Circuit's Bakery Drivers decision in May, yet the complaint alleges the agency still bars terminated plans outside that circuit while letting terminated plans inside it move ahead in the queue.

The boards of 22 multiemployer plans, from foundry workers to food terminal employees, say the PBGC has kept them from applying for the special financial assistance Congress funded in the American Rescue Plan. Congress told the agency to process every application within 120 days; the funds say they have sat on a waitlist for more than a year without being allowed to file at all. The complaint also attacks the PBGC's position that terminated plans are ineligible, which the Second Circuit struck down in the Bakery Drivers case, now the subject of the agency's pending Supreme Court petition. The plans asked for a preliminary injunction and an expedited hearing the day they filed, and the docket has not slowed for the calendar. The court entered a scheduling order on Labor Day.

This week's roundup, a short-handed edition with no case of the week, flags two decisions as most notable. In Central States v. McClain the Seventh Circuit held that Arkansas's latest pharmacy benefit manager regulation survives ERISA preemption, and in Liu v. Kaiser the Ninth Circuit extended the substantial compliance doctrine to benefit elections. The edition also collects the week's decisions on arbitration, attorneys' fees, fiduciary breach, disability claims, preemption, exhaustion, and pleading.

The agency raised rates that pension plans and multiemployer plans use for valuation and funding purposes.

Roberts Disability Law walks through the Seventh Circuit's decision in Central States v. McClain, covered here yesterday from the slip opinion, affirming dismissal of the fund's ERISA preemption challenge to Arkansas Rule 128's pharmacy dispensing-fee and reporting requirements.

The Seventh Circuit affirmed dismissal of Central States' ERISA preemption challenge to Arkansas Insurance Rule 128, holding that the state's requirement that health plans pay pharmacies “fair and reasonable” dispensing fees is a cost regulation permitted under Rutledge, and that the rule's companion reporting mandate survives because it exists only to enforce that fee requirement, fitting the narrow room the Supreme Court's Gobeille decision leaves for state reporting duties. The panel flagged that ERISA's newly enacted uniform pharmacy-compensation reporting rules, effective for plan years beginning 30 months after February 3, 2026, may change the analysis later. For self-funded plans, the decision extends Rutledge's reach from reimbursement floors to state-mandated fees and data reporting.

Multiemployer plans' aggregate funded position reached 106 percent at midyear, a recent-history high. Healthier funds change the withdrawal-liability settlement calculus on both sides of the table.

In an unpublished memorandum, the Ninth Circuit affirmed an arbitration award holding that a multiemployer plan actuary's use of PBGC-published interest rate assumptions to calculate withdrawal liability violated ERISA's requirement that assumptions represent the actuary's best estimate of anticipated experience. The plan's 7 percent minimum funding rate applied instead. See The Second Thing above.

In City of Tacoma v. Western Metal Industry Pension Fund, the Ninth Circuit affirmed a funding-rate-based recalculation of withdrawal liability, another reminder that contesting multiemployer assessments remains an uphill battle.

On July 7, 2026, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C.

The U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled that the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) does not require multiemployer pension plans to use actuarial assumptions to calculate withdrawal liability adopted before a certain deadline.

New survey data shows the resurgence of green-zone plans, funded status trends and lessons for the future of multiemployer pensions.

Pension fund sues five janitorial service contractors for failing to pay required pension contributions and provide reporting information; court grants motion to dismiss but allows amended complaint.

Cir. July 7, 2026) This consolidated appeal arose from a dispute between the Trustees of the IAM National Pension Fund and a family of affiliated truck dealerships operating as M&K Truck Centers.

Iron workers' unions sued a crane company for failing to make required contributions to union trust funds for work performed by its employees, but the court affirmed summary judgment against the unions because they lacked admissible evidence of damages after an expert witness was excluded.

the case in which the Supreme Court held in May that a plan’s actuary may calculate an employer’s withdrawal liability using actuarial assumptions adopted after the measurement date.

The United States Supreme Court recently held in M&K Employee Solutions, LLC et al. v. Trustees of the IAM National Pension Fund that the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (“ERISA”)

and what trustees can do to lower administrative costs.