Two Dates Decide Which SCE Pension You Have. Neither of Them Was Your Choice.

The first is 1 April 1999, when the plan moved to cash balance features. Whether you were carried into that or kept the prior formula was tested as of 31 March 1999, and the test was not your hire date: you had to be at least age 50, or have 60 combined age-and-service points, on that day.

The second is 31 December 2017. Employees hired on or after that date are not eligible for the pension plan at all. In its place, the company makes additional non-contributory employer contributions to the Edison 401(k) Savings Plan.

A rough screen, which you should check rather than trust: to have been grandfathered you needed to be born around March 1949 or earlier, so anyone under roughly sixty today is almost certainly pure cash balance. And anyone who started on or after 31 December 2017 has no pension to plan around, only a larger 401(k) contribution.

One edge worth knowing about if you started right on the line. The qualified plan is closed to employees hired "on or after December 31, 2017", while the separate executive plan uses "on or after January 1, 2018". Both dates appear in the same proxy statement. If you were hired on 31 December 2017 exactly, only the plan document settles it.

Each month you have an hour of service, the plan credits a pay credit of between 3% and 9% of base pay, varying by your age-plus-service points, plus a flat $150. The flat credit is the same for everyone eligible that month, which makes it proportionally far more valuable at lower pay. It was $100 a month at the time of the 2008 proxy and had reached $150 by 2016.

The exact pay credit bands inside that 3% to 9% range are not published anywhere. The range is disclosed; the schedule is not. Anyone showing you a complete tier table for this is not working from a filing.

Interest is credited monthly, and the mechanism is public even though the rate is not: it is based on the third segment rate of an IRS-specified corporate bond yield curve, taken from the August preceding the plan year. That wording has been identical in every proxy from 2008 to 2026. Before February 2008 the basis was the 30-year Treasury rate for the preceding August.

Be careful with one number. The 10-K reports 6.06% for 2025, and it is tempting to read that as your crediting rate. It is not. It is a long-term actuarial assumption. The August 2024 third segment rate, which is what the described mechanism would use for the 2025 plan year, was 5.40%. The two do not match, which tells you they are different things. Your declared rate lives in the plan documents or your annual statement.

Vesting is three years of service, or reaching age 65, or death in service. That has been the rule since 1 February 2008; before then it was graded at 20% a year with full vesting at five.

At separation you may elect a lump sum, a life annuity, a joint and survivor annuity if married, or a contingent annuity. For a married participant the automatic form is a joint and 50% survivor annuity unless you elect otherwise with spousal consent, which federal law requires.

Here is the part that matters: the cost of that spousal survivor benefit is fully subsidised by Edison International and SCE. In most pension plans, electing a joint and survivor annuity reduces the participant's monthly payment to pay for the survivor coverage. You buy it out of your own benefit. At SCE you do not.

That materially raises the implicit value of the annuity against the lump sum for anyone married, and it is almost never in the comparison people run. A lump-sum-versus-annuity spreadsheet that treats the two as economically equivalent before survivor coverage is comparing the wrong things: you are giving up a benefit somebody else is paying for.

Timing is flexible in both directions. You can begin payments after separation from service, or defer commencement to age 72. And you do not have to separate to start planning it, the reduction factors are steep at the bottom. The proxy gives 53.6% of the age-65 benefit for someone who terminates before 55 and commences at 55, against 77% for someone who reaches 55 still employed and retires then. Between 55 and 61 the reductions ease, and from 61 to 64 the benefit is unreduced.

The gap in all of this, and it is the one that would actually change a decision: the basis on which the plan converts your benefit into a lump sum, the mortality table, the stability period, the lookback month, is not disclosed in any public filing. Those inputs determine whether separating in one month rather than another is worth thousands. Only the plan document has them.

The plan has been closed to new hires since 31 December 2017, and that is the fact most people have heard. It is routinely repeated as "the pension is frozen", which is a different claim and not a true one.

The evidence is in the accounting. SCE reported $90 million of pension service cost for 2025 and Edison International $94 million. Service cost is the value of benefits earned by employees during the year, a genuinely frozen plan reports none. The 2026 proxy also still describes the monthly pay credits in the present tense, and the plan's most recent regulatory filing carries a not-frozen flag.

The plan is also overfunded on both reporting entities' numbers at the end of 2025, which is worth knowing mainly because it makes the anxious version of this conversation unnecessary.

The practical consequence is that staying has an ongoing value that is easy to underestimate, and leaving stops something that is still running. That is a different calculation from leaving a plan where the benefit stopped growing years ago.

The lump sum conversion basis. The mortality table, the stability period and the lookback month decide what your lump sum is actually worth and how much it moves month to month. Not in any filing.

Your declared cash balance crediting rate, year by year. The mechanism is public; the rate the plan actually declares is not, and the 10-K figure is an actuarial assumption rather than that rate.

The pay credit bands inside the disclosed 3% to 9% range, and the transition credit bands inside the legacy 3% to 6% range.

For grandfathered participants: the accrual rate and averaging definition of the prior formula as it applies to the qualified plan, isolated from the executive plan, and whether the grandfathered qualified benefit still carries a Social Security offset at all. The 2026 proxy names only the 401(k) profit sharing offset in that paragraph.

The early retirement reduction factors for ages 56 through 60. The endpoints are published; the middle is not.

One thing this page deliberately does not cover: the investment options inside the companion Edison 401(k) Savings Plan, including whether it offers a self-directed brokerage window. The pension research does not address it, and we are not going to assume a feature exists because a comparable employer has one.

All of this sits in the SCE Retirement Plan summary plan description, which you can get through Edison's benefits portal or by written request. The plan administrator has thirty days to respond under ERISA. One SPD closes every gap on this list at once.