A total of 97 retirees from the New York State and Local Retirement System (NYSLRS) were eligible for pensions of $200,000 or more during the 2025 fiscal year, according to new data posted on SeeThroughNY.net, the Empire Center’s government transparency website.
Among the 97 retirees were public hospital doctors, police officers, psychiatrists, and government administrators. Twenty-one of the retirees retired from the Suffolk County Police Department while another seventeen retired from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and eleven from the Nassau Health Care Corporation.
The 480,393 pensioners of the state’s retirement system were eligible to receive $15.6 billion in pensions during the fiscal year 2025, up twenty-five percent since 2020 ($12.6 billion). Of these pensioners, 11,384 were eligible to receive more than $100,000 – a ten percent increase from the previous year.
Like the previous year, the largest eligible pension went to Kara Bennorth, a former communications executive at the Westchester Health Care Corporation, who was eligible to collect $503,128 – more than half of which came from an excess benefit plan. Bennorth is the first person to be eligible for a pension above $500,000 since the Empire Center started collecting the data in 2008.
The next-highest pensions went to:
- Dr. Shashikant B. Lele, Roswell Park Cancer Institute, $438,102
- Richard J. Batista, Nassau Health Care Corp., $339,874
- Paul E. Scott, Nassau Health Care Corp., $329,693
- Brian M. Murray, Erie County Medical Center Corp., $327,322
Of the 12,928 newly retired full-career members—defined as those with at least 20 years of service—1,272 were police officers and firefighters in New York’s Police and Fire Retirement System (PFRS), who were eligible for an average pension of $98,011. In contrast, the rest of the 11,875 new retirees from the state’s Employees Retirement System (ERS) averaged less than half the PFRS amount, at $46,796.
More than fifty percent of the new retirees eligible to receive six-figure pensions were from PFRS, although they represent less than ten percent of the most recent cohort of NYSLRS pensioners.
The full data set can be found on SeeThroughNY.net, and the new data includes names and allowable pension amounts for 480,393 retirees from state agencies, public authorities and local governments as well as non-teaching school district positions. The amounts, which are exempt from state income tax, show what retirees were eligible to collect during the plan’s 2025 fiscal year, which ended March 31.
The Empire Center, based in Albany, is an independent, not-for-profit, non-partisan think tank dedicated to promoting policies that can make New York a better place to live, work and raise a family.
