“If you’re asking me to answer that question in terms of numbers, yes, we have a huge sustainability problem,” said Charlie Chieppo, a senior fellow at the Boston-based Pioneer Institute. “If you’re asking me to answer it in terms of politics, it seems to me that we’re pretty patient.”

The highest-paid beneficiary last year was Thomas D. Manning, a former deputy chancellor at the UMass Chan Medical School, who earned $349,905, according to data from the state comptroller’s office. Manning worked with UMass for 34 years before his retirement in 2012, according to the school’s website.

The next two highest-paid retirees were also affiliated with UMass Chan. Vivian Budnik, a neuroscientist who retired in 2024, collected $341,804, while Joyce Murphy, vice chancellor of Commonwealth Medicine until 2018, collected $341,061.

One of the highest state pensions goes to William Bulger, who was paid $274,538 last year as the former president of the UMass system. The longtime Senate president resigned from UMass in 2003, after details about his relationship with his then-fugitive brother, James “Whitey” Bulger, came to light.

Almost all the top recipients were former employees of the University of Massachusetts system; of the top 20, only former Springfield Public Schools superintendent Daniel J. Warwick had no ties to the system. (Warwick retired in 2024 after 48 years in local public education. He collected $239,669 in benefits in 2025.)

Despite the eye-popping pensions received by the state’s former top earners, Shawn Duhamel, chief executive of the Mass. Retirees Association, noted the average pension payment is significantly lower.

Last year, the average annual pension was about $48,700, according to state data. For Massachusetts teachers, the average pension was approximately $51,800, and for other state employees, roughly $45,600.

Massachusetts is one of a handful of states that does not participate in Social Security for its public workforce, Duhamel said. Even public retirees who do qualify for Social Security, through past work in the private sector, often get the “lion’s share” of their retirement income from their public pension.

“The success of the pension system is absolutely critical to someone’s retirement security and peace of mind in retirement,” he said.

State employees must have completed at least 10 years of service to have their pension vested, meaning they are eligible to receive state benefits. To officially retire and start collecting those benefits, they must be either older than 55 (in some cases, 60) or have completed 20 years of service.

How much they collect depends on their length of service and their highest annual salaries over three consecutive years (in some cases, five years), per state guidelines. Annual pension payments are capped at 80 percent of their three-year (or five-year) average.

David Holway, president of the National Association of Government Employees, said the “vast majority” of state employees are rank-and-file administrators and blue-collar workers who generally pay off most, if not all of their own retirement benefits through their salary contributions. (Different groups of state workers contribute different amounts depending on their pension classification.)

“I‘m not talking about the doctors at UMass Medical and the other high-paid employees at the state universities,” said Holway, whose union represents workers at UMass, MassDOT, and the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority, among other agencies. “I’m talking about the average person that goes to work for the state and does their job every day under tough circumstances.”

Though beneficiaries in academic, administrative, and medical fields received the highest pension payments, the state agency with the most benefits overall was the Department of Corrections. The state paid roughly $220.8 million to roughly 4,400 DOC beneficiaries last year.

Next was the Massachusetts State Police, whose beneficiaries received $204.5 million last year. The average benefit totaled $83,810, the highest number for any state agency with more than 1,000 recipients.

The highest-earning State Police beneficiary was John D. Pinkham, a former lieutenant colonel in the Division of Standards and Training who retired last year. He collected $199,736.

Certain quasi-public state agencies are excluded from the state’s pension system, including the MBTA, which has its own pension fund. The City of Boston also operates its own retirement system, which paid $760.6 million in benefits to approximately 15,000 beneficiaries in 2024, the most recent data available.

The state pension system provided benefits to 135,820 people last year, roughly 1,700 more than in 2024, per state data. That number represents an increase of about 5 percent from 2020, and about 14 percent from 2015.

Massachusetts’ pension fund is coming off two successive quarters of record balances, reaching $121.1 billion in the first quarter of 2026, according to a statement from the state Pension Reserves Investment Management board, or MassPRIM. The fund has also outperformed the 7 percent net return target, with a 9.6 percent yearly return in fiscal year 2025.

A board spokesperson provided comment from MassPRIM chief executive Michael Trotsky, who said at a Dec. 4 meeting that the organization remains “pleased and confident” about the fund’s performance.

The board’s confidence stands in contrast to uncertainty surrounding state pension plans across the country. A report released earlier this month by firm Equable found that most public pension plans in the country are “still distressed or fragile,” though the percentage of nationwide plans that are funded improved slightly.

“The sobering reality is that despite three years of solid returns and record-high contribution rates, public plans have barely recovered the ground lost in 2022’s market downturn,” the report reads. “Public pension funds are surviving, but they are not thriving.”

Chieppo, of the Pioneer Institute, said there are several changes to the pension system that could offer workers more flexibility and lessen the financial burden on the state, though for now that seems unlikely.

“The reality is that the state pension should have changed years and years ago to be made more sustainable, so that the funded level doesn’t go down or continue going down, so that it’s not so volatile, so that people don’t have to stay [in public jobs] when they don’t want to,” he said. “But you know, it’s awfully hard, and that’s a generous way to put it, to actually make any of that happen.”

But compared with other public retirement funds — namely, the troubled MBTA Retirement Fund — Chieppo said the state pension system “looks like Fidelity.”

Union president Holway said pension plans are one of the few advantages the public sector has when competing with private industry for employees.

“If you didn’t have a pension system, you didn’t have health insurance, if you didn’t have vacation, then why would you go to work for the state?” Holway said. “State employees are paid less than their counterparts in the private sector, so you have to give them a reason to actually take a job.”

Camilo Fonseca can be reached at camilo.fonseca@globe.com. Follow him on X @fonseca_esq and on Instagram @camilo_fonseca.reports. Neena Hagen can be reached at neena.hagen@globe.com.