How secure is your pension?
The amount of your pension with PME is not fixed. You can read more about this below.
Development financial situation
Our financial situation affects the amount of your pension. Our financial situation depends on the following factors:
- Life expectancy: the older people get, the longer we will have to pay pension. That means we will need more money.
- Low interest rates make pensions more expensive. If interest rates are low, we need more money to be able to pay the same pension.
- The results of our investments may be disappointing or better than expected.
What is the funding ratio/policy funding ratio?
The funding ratio shows the relation between PME’s capital and the amount PME needs to pay all pensions now and in the future. The policy funding ratio is the average of the funding ratios of the last twelve months. The higher the funding ratio, the better we are doing financially.
Pension increase
Every year, the pension board looks at our financial position, and decides if pensions can be increased. For a long time, our financial position was not good enough. However, the government temporarily relaxed the rules. With this relaxation, the government anticipates the new pension rules. This allowed us to increase pensions in mid-2022 and early 2023 by a total of almost 7.5 percent. And as of 1 January 2024 by another 3.26 percent. In 2024 we don’t make use of the relaxed rules. Because if it goes worse financially, we have to decrease pensions sooner with the relaxed rules. We want to keep the risk of decreasing pensions as low as possible. Based on the current rules, we are able to increase pensions by a maximum of 0.3 percent as of 1 January 2025. Everybody who has a pension with PME received this increase.
Pension decrease
If our policy funding ratio is too low legally speaking, there is a deficit. Pensions may need to be decreased. In the last five years, we did not lower the pensions.
The past 5 years
Below is a list of the changes in pensions during the past 5 years. The third column shows the price increase in percentages.
| Date | Pension increase | Price increase* |
|---|---|---|
| 1 January 2025 | 0.30% | 2.71% |
| 1 January 2024 | 3.26% | 3.26% |
| 1 January 2023 | 6.20% | 12.45% |
| 1 July 2022 | 1.29% | n.v.t. |
| 1 January 2022 | 0.00% | 1.29% |
| 1 January 2021 | 0.00% | 1.56% |
* Price increases from the month of July of a year compared to the month of July of the previous year. This is based on information from Statistics Netherlands.
Recovery plan
At the moment, a recovery plan applies to PME. It describes how our financial situation is expected to develop over the next ten years. View the current (policy) funding ratio and the current information about the recovery plan.