PA PSERS Final Average Salary: What Counts and How It Is Calculated

Where final average salary fits

A PSERS pension is your years of credited service multiplied by your class multiplier multiplied by your final average salary. The first two are fixed by your record and your class. Final average salary is the one you can influence — and the one people most often misjudge.

It is not your last year's salary and it is not your career average. It is the average of a small number of your best years.

Which years PSERS uses

For Classes T-C, T-D, T-E, and T-F, PSERS averages your three highest non-overlapping 12-month periods of school-year earnings. They are usually your last three years, but not always — an earlier year with a large stipend or a higher-paying position can be one of the three.

For Classes T-G and T-H — the hybrid classes for members who joined July 2019 or later — PSERS averages your five highest years instead. Because a five-year window reaches further back into lower-paid years, the resulting average is typically lower than a three-year average of the same career.

What counts as compensation

PSERS counts your regular salary and standard, recurring extra pay for work performed — for example a contracted extracurricular stipend or summer teaching. It does not count payments that are not for regular services: lump-sum payouts for unused sick or vacation days, severance, bonuses, most fringe benefits, and one-time payments arranged around retirement.

PSERS also applies anti-spiking limits. If your compensation in one of the years used for the average is far above your recent norm, PSERS can cap the amount it recognizes so a single inflated year does not distort the pension. The specifics are technical, but the intent is simple: the average should reflect your real career earnings, not an engineered final year.

Practical steps

Look at your PSERS Statement of Account and check the reported earnings for each recent year. If a number looks wrong, raise it with your employer's PSERS reporting contact now rather than at retirement.

If you are considering a higher-paying role or a large stipend in your final years to lift the average, ask PSERS how it would be treated first. A raise that PSERS partly disregards, or that lands outside your best three (or five) years, may not change your pension at all.

• Confirm which averaging window your class uses (3 or 5 years).
• Review reported earnings on your Statement of Account each year.
• Ask whether a specific stipend or new position counts as compensation.
• Request a retirement estimate that shows the exact years being averaged.

Partial years and how they combine

PSERS builds each of your averaging years from 12 months of service, which may cross school-year boundaries. A year you worked only part-time, or started mid-year, can be combined with adjacent service to form one of the 12-month periods used in the average.

This matters if your highest earnings came in a stretch that does not line up neatly with a July–June school year. Ask PSERS for an estimate that shows exactly which periods it is using, so there are no surprises about which raise made it into the average.