$3.91B
promised to retirees
in today's dollars
99.5%
of it is unsaved
only $17.9M set aside
$251.6M
from property taxes this year
and rising every year
34%
of your city tax line
goes to this one fund
A pension fund with almost no money in it
FPDR stands for Fire & Police Disability and Retirement. It pays pensions, disability, and survivor benefits to Portland's police officers and firefighters. The benefits are normal. What's strange — and expensive — is how Portland pays for them.
How almost every pension works
Money is set aside while you're still working and invested for decades. By the time you retire, investment growth has done most of the heavy lifting. It's a piggy bank that fills up and earns interest. This is how Oregon's PERS system works, and nearly every other public pension in the country.
How FPDR works: “pay-as-you-go”
Portland saves essentially nothing. Each year, property taxes are collected to cover that year's retiree checks — and that's it. There's no invested piggy bank doing the work, so taxpayers are on the hook for the whole thing, forever. Worse, with nothing set aside the unfunded balance keeps growing instead of being paid down — the city falls further behind each year, the opposite of what accepted funding guidelines call for. Analysts say only Portland and Puerto Rico still run a public pension this way.
The result: FPDR has promised $3.91B in benefits but holds just $17.9M in savings — less than one percent of what it owes. A normal pension aims for 100%.
Source: Milliman, Inc. actuarial valuation, June 30, 2024.
Where this year's money goes
Of the roughly $251.6M collected this year, most pays pensions to people who already retired. A growing slice pre-funds PERS for officers and firefighters hired since 2007 — so Portland is now paying for two systems at once.
Monthly checks to FPDR One & Two retirees and their survivors
Pre-funded retirement contributions for everyone hired since 2007
Injury, disability and survivor benefits for sworn members
Running the fund, the board, and claims processing
Program spending, FY2025-26. Source: City of Portland.
What are you personally paying?
FPDR is its own line on your Multnomah County property tax bill. Move the slider to your home's assessed value to see your share.
Your home
Drag to your home's assessed value — the number on your county tax statement, usually well below what the home would sell for.
You pay FPDR about
$1,046
per year — about $87/month on this one pension fund
34%
of your City of Portland property taxes
$7,611
projected over FY26–FY31, as the rate climbs
This is a separate line on your Multnomah County tax bill, labeled “Portland Fire/Police Pension.” Every property inside Portland city limits pays it.
Based on the FY2025-26 FPDR rate of $2.9874 per $1,000 of assessed value (Multnomah County). The multi-year figure grows assessed value by the city's assumed ~3%/year and applies its published rate forecast through FY31 (City of Portland), since both the rate and the assessed base keep rising. In Oregon, Measure 50 caps assessed-value growth and decoupled it from market value — so assessed value tracks neither a home's sale price nor how “nice” it is.
The bill keeps climbing
Because Portland never saved up, the yearly tax bill grows as more officers and firefighters retire. It has gone from about $169 million a few years ago to $279.2M just approved for next year.
FPDR levy by fiscal year, in millions. FY30 is the city's own projection. Sources: Multnomah County, City of Portland.
It quietly squeezes other services
Oregon caps how much property tax can be charged. As FPDR's slice grows, it pushes the city toward that cap — and when the cap is hit, other levies get cut (“compression”).
But it probably won't hit its ceiling
The fund has a legal cap of $2.80 per $1,000 of market value. The city's actuary ran 10,000 scenarios and found less than a 2% chance of hitting it before 2044 — the rate is forecast to crest around 2033, then ease as older retirees pass away.
The people on the other end
This isn't an abstraction — it's real benefits for real people who did dangerous jobs. About 2,000 retirees and survivors get a check today, and a few hundred officers and firefighters are still earning the old pension.
2,014
getting a pension check
retirees and the surviving spouses of officers and firefighters
$78,000
average pension, per year
with a 2% cost-of-living bump most years
552
still on the job, pre-2007
the last members still earning the old pay-go pension
They retire young, after long careers
A typical member retires around age 52 with about 25 years of service. Public-safety work is hard on the body, and many start drawing a pension decades before most people retire.
Some beneficiaries are in their 90s
Checks still go to surviving spouses who are 95+ — widows and widowers of officers and firefighters who died long ago. A survivor's benefit is paid for that person's entire life.
142 ex-spouses get a slice, too
Through divorce court orders, former spouses receive a court-assigned share of a member's pension — a reminder that these obligations stretch across whole families and lifetimes.
The 'extra paycheck' retirement spike
Because pensions are based on final pay, members cluster their retirements into months with an extra pay period to boost the calculation. In FYE2021 that helped drive a record 106 retirements in a single year.
These are real benefits earned by people who ran toward danger for a living — the question this page is about is not whether they should be paid, but how Portland chooses to pay for them. Counts and averages are from the city actuary's June 30, 2024 valuation.
If everyone agrees it's a mess, why isn't it fixed?
Almost everyone — including the city's own pension director — agrees pay-as-you-go is the wrong way to fund this. It stays in place anyway, for four stubborn reasons.
You can't cut the benefits
Oregon courts treat an earned pension as a binding promise. In a line of cases ending with Moro v. State (Oregon Supreme Court), the Oregon Supreme Court ruled that benefits already earned can't be reduced. So reform can't cut the benefits retirees were promised — it can only change how they're paid for, and how much they ultimately cost taxpayers.
Fixing it means funding two things at once for a while
To start saving properly, Portland would keep paying today's retirees and set aside new money for the future at the same time. That transition is the single hardest part — it raises taxes now to lower them much more later. It isn't exotic: amortizing an unfunded liability this way is how nearly every other public pension in the country is funded. The catch is political — the payoff is real, but it arrives decades after today's officials are gone.
Almost nobody knows it's there
The cost is buried in a line item most people never read, set by a separate board, and it rises automatically without a public vote. A problem nobody sees is a problem nobody is forced to fix.
It needs a citywide vote
The rules live in the city charter, so any real change — including the option to start saving — would have to go to the ballot. That takes years of public education and political will the city hasn't spent yet, even as it faces a $160M+ budget shortfall.
Could saving up actually be cheaper?
Here's what a real funding policy looks like: fully fund the pension over 30 years, with the bill set to decline every year and fall away once the debt is paid off. Add a bond to soften the early bump, or set the return to 0% to watch the savings vanish.
The yearly property-tax bill for police & fire pensions, in millions. A real funding policy costs more at first (until 2034), then less every year — and falls away once the liability is paid off in 2055.
Lifetime cost saved
$2.46B
29% less than pay-go ($8.47B → $6.01B), all from investment returns
The near-term bump
+$96M (+57%)
higher at the start (around 2025), then it declines every year
For a $350,000 home
$10,216
your household's share of the lifetime savings
This is a simplified teaching model, not an official forecast. It applies a real funding-policy structure — a declining-dollar amortization of the unfunded liability over 30 years at a 7% return, the kind of policy analysts like Kevin Machiz recommend (Kevin Machiz, CFA, FRM) — to the city actuary's own benefit projections (the $8.47B lifetime pay-go cost, peaking in the mid-2030s; Milliman, Inc.). A real policy would phase in the first year or two more gently than shown, and the future bill is in plain (not inflation-adjusted) dollars.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page is drawn from primary sources — the city's actuary, county tax records, and city budget documents — verified in June 2026. The reform simulator is a simplified educational model; everything else is reported data.
A note on the funding debate
Analysts like Kevin Machiz and Marc Poris argue Portland should start pre-funding, because over the life of the plan it could save a quarter to a third of the cost. The city counters that the upfront transition cost is enormous and arrives when budgets are tightest. Both are right — which is what makes it genuinely hard rather than obvious.