You’re treating “the pension was funded all along” as if the company puts aside a fixed dollar amount for each pilot and then has no further exposure. That is not how a corporate DB plan works. A frozen pension still requires assets, but the liability changes every year, because it’s based on:
- changes in discount rate
- changes in mortality assumptions
- changes in actual vs expected investment returns
- changes in workforce size
- changes in retirements relative to projections
A corporate pension is not a savings account; it is a financial liability whose value resets every year under accounting rules.
Even if the pension is “funded,” the company still bears:
· longevity risk,
· interest-rate risk, and
· investment-return risk—the three biggest variables in any DB plan.
That’s what DC eliminates.
Now, to your direct question: How much does the company save?
Not in annual cash. In annual risk and liability exposure.
Here are the real numbers under the assumptions we used:
- 18% DC costs the company ~$359M per year (pure cash outflow)
- Continuing the pension costs the company ~$515M per year, which includes:
- ~$85M in annual service cost, plus
- ~$427M in new long-term obligations created each year (based on retirements and payout assumptions)
So the company is not “saving” cash by switching to DC.
They’re avoiding roughly $400–450M per year in new pension liabilities that would otherwise sit on their books for the next 20–30 years.
That’s the difference.
You’re focusing on funding requirements, which can be $0 for years because of discount-rate changes. I’m talking about the economic cost of new obligations, not the IRS minimum contribution.
Even if a pension is 100% funded today,
every new hire generates a new stream of future liabilities that the company must discount, value, invest against, and carry.
DC eliminates that permanently.
So the “savings” you’re demanding in annual cash terms doesn’t exist.
The real savings is the elimination of $400–450M in new liabilities every single year. And the $85 million in service costs. Half a billion dollars in aggregate.
That’s what I meant by “investing back into the company”—they eliminate a half-billion dollars of balance sheet drag per year, which measurably increases shareholder equity and frees up capital for other uses. That’s where they make a killing.