The dividing line is the credential, not the building. CalSTRS covers certificated school employees — teachers, counselors, school psychologists, librarians, principals, superintendents. CalPERS covers most everyone else in California public service: classified school staff (secretaries, aides, custodians, bus drivers), city and county workers at many agencies, state employees, and public-safety officers under their own formulas. Which is why two people working at the same school — a teacher and the office manager — can retire under entirely different rules.
Both are defined-benefit plans built on the same three-part math: age factor × years of service × final compensation. The differences live in the details.
CalSTRS 2% at 60 (hired before 2013): the factor is 2.0% at age 60 and rises about 0.133 per year to a cap of 2.4% at 63. Members with 30+ years of service who retire at 60 or later get a career factor bonus of +0.2% — which means they can reach the 2.4% cap sooner. CalSTRS 2% at 62 (PEPRA, hired 2013 or later): 2.0% at 62, then 2.133 at 63, 2.267 at 64, and 2.4% at 65 — no career factor.
CalPERS miscellaneous members hired before 2013 are typically under 2% at 55 or 2% at 60, depending on the agency's contract; PEPRA hires are under 2% at 62, with factors that keep rising past the CalSTRS cap ages. Safety members are different animals entirely — Classic 3% at 50 and PEPRA 2.7% at 57 — we cover those formulas separately. And PEPRA CalPERS members face a pensionable-compensation cap of $178,820 in 2026: salary above that line earns no pension at all.
Notice what the first two numbers do to a household: the same retirement date can be efficient for one spouse and expensive for the other. A CalSTRS 2%-at-60 member gains nothing by waiting past 63; her PEPRA colleague is still climbing toward 2.4% until 65. Timing the two retirements together, on one spreadsheet, is where the real money is.
CalSTRS members do not pay into Social Security through their teaching job. No 6.2% comes out of the paycheck, and no Social Security credit accrues for those years. Many CalPERS miscellaneous members — including most classified school employees — do pay in, though it depends on the agency's contract. So in a teacher-plus-classified household, one spouse is building two benefits and the other is building one bigger one.
Here is the recent good news. Two old provisions — the Windfall Elimination Provision and the Government Pension Offset — used to reduce Social Security benefits for people with non-covered pensions like CalSTRS. The Social Security Fairness Act repealed both in January 2025, retroactive to January 2024. A teacher who earned Social Security credits from summer jobs or a prior private-sector career now collects the full earned benefit, and spousal or survivor benefits from a CalPERS-covered spouse are no longer offset. If you wrote off Social Security years ago because someone mentioned “the windfall rule,” it is time to re-run the numbers.
CalSTRS pays a 2% simple annual benefit adjustment — always 2% of the original benefit, so the raise never grows. The backstop is the Supplemental Benefit Maintenance Account, which tops up long-retired members so their benefit doesn’t fall below roughly 85% of its original purchasing power. CalPERS COLAs are typically up to 2% compounded, tied to actual CPI and to the contract your employer chose, with its own purchasing-power protection floor. Over a thirty-year retirement, simple versus compounded is not a rounding error — it changes which pension carries more of the late-retirement grocery bill, and therefore which spouse’s benefit you should protect hardest.
This is the gap most couples discover too late. In many contracts, the CalPERS unmodified allowance — the full, highest payout — already includes an automatic 25% survivor continuance to an eligible spouse, before any option election. The CalSTRS Member-Only benefit includes no continuance at all: when the member dies, the check stops. A CalSTRS member who wants to protect a spouse must elect an option and accept a permanently reduced benefit — which is exactly why pension maximization, comparing the option reduction against life insurance priced on the member’s health, matters more for CalSTRS families than almost anyone else.
CalSTRS members have a second account most have never looked at: the Defined Benefit Supplement, funded largely by contribution diversions from 2001–2010 and by earnings above one year of service credit. It sits beside the pension and pays out separately at retirement. It appears on your annual statement — check the balance before you assume the pension line is the whole story.
Pull both annual statements — the CalSTRS Retirement Progress Report and the myCalPERS statement — and put them on the same table. Confirm which formula each spouse is under and what each age factor does over the next five birthdays. Check whether the CalPERS spouse pays into Social Security, and get both Social Security statements now that the repeal is law. Then model the household as one plan: two pensions, one or two Social Security checks, survivor gaps, and the 403(b)/457 accounts that fill whatever the formulas leave open. Where a detail depends on your contract, don’t guess — the systems’ own calculators and your statement settle it.