HOW YOUR OMERS PENSION GROWS
As a defined benefit pension plan, OMERS provides you with secure, predictable retirement income. When you’re ready to retire we use a formula that includes your earnings and years of credited service in the OMERS Primary Plan (the Plan) to calculate your benefit. More service and higher earnings could help to increase your pension or help you retire sooner. Here’s how they work to increase your benefit:
Credited service
This is the paid service (years and months) you have in the Plan, including any service you purchased or transferred in.
While we use credited service to calculate your benefit, you may have eligible service that could help bring you closer to an unreduced early retirement pension. You can read more about the difference between the two by revisiting the “What’s the Difference” article from a previous issue.
“Best five” earnings
To calculate your “best five” earnings, we look at the annual average of the 60 consecutive months during which your contributory earnings were at their highest. The highest 60 months are not necessarily your final five years of earnings – they could occur at any time during your membership(s).
Your employer reports this information to OMERS on an annual basis and you can review it in your personal Pension Report, available in your myOMERS account.
To get a picture of how your years of service and contributory earnings impact your own pension calculation, you can request a pension estimate. See How to Get a Pension Estimate in this issue.
DID YOU KNOW?
Effective January 1, 2021, OMERS will no longer cap your credited service. This means that if you have not reached 35 years of credited service prior to this date, you will continue to contribute and accrue credited service in the Plan – and more credited service means a larger pension when you retire.
Members who are retired or deferred prior to the effective date are not impacted by the change. If a member meets the 35-year cap before January 1, 2021, the limit will continue to apply. Learn more about the elimination of the 35-year cap by reading our FAQs.