Some states have worse retirement funding than others. (Photo: Shutterstock)

Some states' retirement plans are in trouble. Well, quite a few of them, actually. And for some of the least well off, the situation isn't getting any better, by a long shot. In 2015, state governments spent nearly $39 billion—approximately $120 per capita—on retirement funding. And the decades-long arguments over how to fund and distribute pension funds for state government employees has become even more of a flashpoint than in the past, before the Great Recession took its toll on funds already set aside and both state governments and fund managers sought more urgently to bring in higher returns, lest the plans run out of money. As 24/7 Wall St. says, "State pension liabilities can strain overall state finances, especially when the economy is already struggling, and even put funding of other programs at risk." Of course, it's not just a question of how much a state contributed, or how well the plan's assets did in the market. A report from the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College analyzed those assets and concluded that differences in asset allocation, as well as differences in asset class, contributed quite a bit to the sort of returns a given pension plan has. In addition, according to Fitch Ratings, states just aren't doing enough to cut pension liabilities. And the situation doesn't appear to be improving, with FY 2016 seeing an increase in state pension funding gaps — so says the Pew Charitable Trusts. To evaluate just how bad—or good—the situation is in all 50 states, 24/7 Wall St. took a close look at reams of data and ranked each state accordingly. From the U.S. Census Bureau's 2015 State and Local Finance data, it reviewed details on state government spending toward retirement, along with state revenue and cash/security holdings. Then it examined state pension deficit data from the Pew Charitable Trust's "The State Pension Funding Gap: 2016"; reviewed May 2018 data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on state government employment as a share of total nonfarm employment; and considered data on state tax collections from the Tax Foundation's Facts and Figures report, released in 2018 and including collections for fiscal year 2015. All that data gave it the means to identify what each state spends on retirement. There's substantial variation in both funding levels and per capita spending when it comes to state retirement plans, and states with high pension expenditures, it explains, tend to have higher tax collections per capita. In addition, the size of the state government workforce is apparently not a major factor in annual state pension payments. Once its analysis was complete, it ranked all the states in order from the lowest per-capita state retirement fund expenditure to the highest. Below are the 10 states with the worst retirement funding: