BCG Pension Risk Consultants | BCG Penbridge (“BCG”) today announced publication of The Pension Accounting Pushback Challenge, a follow-up article to its February 2026 paper, The Structural Bottleneck in the U.S. Jumbo PRT Market — Feast or Famine. The new article introduces a targeted industry survey designed to clarify the drivers behind today’s pension risk transfer (“PRT”) market dynamics for defined benefit plan sponsors and other key industry stakeholders.
Authored by Steve Keating, Managing Director of BCG, the article re-issues the previously published February paper and invites survey responses from defined benefit plan sponsors, advisors/consultants, actuaries, asset managers, insurers, attorneys, pension accounting experts, and capital markets stakeholders. The survey seeks to identify any alternative explanations for the continued absence of jumbo full plan terminations in the U.S. PRT market beyond the February paper’s central assertion that the market is not constrained by plan funding or insurer capacity, but by pension accounting posture.
For large publicly traded companies, the pension assumption spread introduced in BCG’s February 2026 paper directly affects reported earnings under U.S. GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles), making the accounting treatment of defined benefit plans relevant to equity and credit stakeholders.
“The Milliman 100 Pension Funding Index rose to 112.1% in July 2026, the highest level since June 2001 — a 25-year span,” said Keating. “Yet, the current pipeline for $1 billion-plus defined benefit plan terminations or plan-termination buy-ins that could convert to buy-out is very close to zero. Retiree lift-outs in the jumbo DB plan segment have also slowed materially. The Pushback Challenge is a call to action to identify and raise for discussion any alternative explanations for the lack of jumbo plan annuity purchases in the current environment.”
The full newly published article and survey are available in the August edition of The BCG Pension Insider, the U.S. pension de-risking industry’s most-read monthly newsletter. To access the article and survey, click here: https://bit.ly/4xvl6K0.
As part of the Pushback Challenge, the article highlights the self-sustaining loop — Pension Assumption Spread > Pension Income > Accrued AOCI Loss > Avoidance > Back to the Spread — which clarifies the pension accounting mechanism under U.S. GAAP.
Survey responses are requested by September 25, 2026, and results will be presented in a forthcoming article as part of The Pension Accounting Pushback Challenge.
About BCG Pension Risk Consultants | BCG Penbridge
BCG specializes in assisting defined benefit plan sponsors with managing the costs and risks associated with their pension plans. Since 1983, BCG has successfully helped over 3,000 organizations achieve their pension de-risking goals. Our clients range from publicly-traded companies, to privately held firms, and include manufacturing, healthcare, banks, and not-for-profit organizations. BCG helps clients with the full range of pension de-risking strategies from liability driven investing approaches to partial or full pension risk transfer, including navigating the complex and lengthy process of plan termination. BCG frequently works in collaboration with plan advisors, consulting actuaries, institutional investment consultants, asset managers, and law firms and BCG maintains established working relationships with each of the insurers active in the U.S. PRT market. BCG is headquartered in Braintree, MA with satellite offices across the U.S. Please visit our website at: www.bcgpension.com.
About The BCG Pension Insider
The BCG Pension Insider is the most read monthly newsletter in the U.S. pension de-risking industry with over 15,000 subscribers comprised entirely of plan sponsors, advisors/consultants, actuaries, asset managers, employee benefits and ERISA attorneys, insurers, reinsurers and other pension industry participants. To subscribe, visit: bcgpension.com/sign-up.
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