Data sourced from Dakota Private Markets, the private fund performance platform powered by Dakota. Learn More | Request Access
Public pension funds collectively manage more than $2.3 trillion in assets on behalf of 13.8 million members across the United States (NCPERS 2024 Public Retirement Systems Study, February 2024). As government entities, they operate under open records laws that require them to disclose what they pay their investment managers. That requirement is consistent. What it produces in practice is not.
Pull fee schedules from two different public pension funds and you will often find two different documents in everything but name. One plan lists base fee, incentive fee, and total fee by manager, updated monthly. Another posts the same category of document with the actual figures redacted. A third publishes a clean quarterly series stretching back years, while a peer of similar size publishes once and stops. The disclosure requirement is the same. The result on the page is not.
This guide looks at what that variance actually looks like across real fee schedules currently in Dakota Marketplace, and what it means for a fund manager trying to use fee data to prepare for a raise.
The case for disclosure hasn't changed: taxpayers and beneficiaries have a right to know what a public plan pays for outside management. What has changed is the pressure toward a common format for that disclosure. ILPA released its first fee reporting template in 2016 and updated it to Version 2.0 in January 2025, now the expected standard for funds in their investment period as of Q1 2026 or commencing operations after January 1, 2026 (ILPA, January 2025). CalPERS put the rationale plainly: "Transparency is vital to ensure that investors are fulfilling their fiduciary duty on behalf of their members" (Chief Investment Officer, January 2025).
A common template on the GP side, though, does not guarantee a common presentation on the plan side. What actually gets posted still depends on the individual pension fund, which is where the variance below comes from.
Atlanta's Police Officers, Firefighters, and General Employees pension funds each post monthly fee schedules covering base fee, incentive fee, and total fee across their manager roster, filed as recently as August 2026. These are among the more complete disclosures in Dakota's document library: manager-by-manager, fee-type-by-fee-type, updated on a rolling monthly basis rather than annually.
Not every plan that discloses discloses the numbers. Chicago's Municipal Employees Annuity & Benefit Fund (MEABF) posts a fee schedule document explicitly marked "Redacted." The plan is complying with its disclosure obligation in form, a document exists and is public, without necessarily giving a fund manager or researcher the specific figures that document usually contains elsewhere.
Plan size doesn't predict disclosure depth. Franklin Regional Retirement System, a Massachusetts plan with a fraction of the AUM of a state-level system, has a quarterly fee schedule history in Dakota's library running back to mid-2019, giving a longer and more consistent disclosure record than some far larger plans manage to maintain.
Don't assume disclosure completeness scales with plan size. A large state system and a small municipal plan can sit at opposite ends of the transparency range, in either direction.
Prepare fee data at ILPA-template detail regardless of what the plan itself publishes. A plan that redacts its own schedule may still expect a manager's reporting to meet the current standard once a relationship starts.
Treat a redacted or sparse fee schedule as a research gap, not a dead end. As covered in What Is a Fee Study? How Public Pension Funds Track What They Pay Managers, Dakota Marketplace aggregates fee data across more than 35,000 investments at the manager level, which means a redacted plan-level schedule is often not the only source available for understanding what a specific plan has paid.
Dakota Marketplace tracks close to 1,500 public pension funds across the U.S., including fee schedule data covering manager-level fees by strategy, asset class, mandate size, and geography. Request access to Dakota Private Markets to see how we're bringing clarity to private fund performance.