Analysis of the current panorama of pensions in the Afore system
According to official data from the first government report of President Claudia Sheinbaum, as of June of this year, a total of 102,928 people were registered who retired in Mexico under the Retirement Fund Administrators (Afore) scheme. The analysis of these figures reveals that the average monthly pension that these beneficiaries receive amounts to five thousand 216 pesos, a figure that serves as a fundamental starting point to evaluate the effectiveness of the implemented policies.
A significant finding, and perhaps the most relevant of this report, is that 90.9% of pensioners were directly benefited by the regulatory modification that reduced the requirement for weeks of contributions. This modification, approved in the 2020 reform applied to the Retirement Savings Systems Law, constitutes a major structural change. The concrete effect of this policy has been an average increase of 23.4% in the amount of pension that retirees currently receive, compared to what they would have obtained if the previous legal framework had been maintained.
The creation and function of the Pension Fund for Wellbeing
With the primary objective of increasing replacement rates—a concept that refers to the percentage of the last salary that a worker receives as a pension—, in 2024 a comprehensive reform was implemented aimed at ensuring higher pensions for contributing workers assigned to the IMSS and ISSSTE individual account system. This legislative initiative culminated in the creation of the Pension Fund for Wellbeing, a financial support mechanism designed to close the gap between accumulated savings and the expectation of income during old age.
The operation of the Fund is governed by a specific criterion: its objective is to ensure that working people who contribute to the individual accounts regime, who reach the age of 65 and whose calculated pension is equal to or less than 17,364.9 pesos, receive a complementary amount. This contribution has the purpose of equalizing the total pension to the amount of the last salary received, up to the aforementioned economic limit. This approach seeks to mitigate one of the chronic problems of the individual capitalization system: the insufficiency of savings to generate a decent life income.
Financial composition and return processes of the Fund
The income structure of the Welfare Pension Fund is particularly interesting from a public policy perspective. A substantial part of its resources was formed from the transfer of the balances of the so-called inactive accounts belonging to people over 70 years of age in the case of the IMSS and 75 years of age in the case of the ISSSTE. However, the mechanism includes a crucial safeguard: when the original owners or their legitimate beneficiaries so request, the full return of the resources that were previously transferred to the Fund is executed.
The operational data as of June 2025 detail that this reimbursement process has been carried out in a notable manner. A total of two thousand 789.2 million pesos have been returned to a universe of 61,016 people who submitted the corresponding request. An analysis of the distribution of these returns by institution reveals that 36% were managed through the IMSS, 38% through the Infonavit Institute and the remaining 26% were processed by the ISSSTE. This distribution reflects the composition of the worker base in each of the institutes.
Regarding the capitalization of the Fund, in the month of June 2025, three different financial contributions were received, which together totaled five thousand 159.3 million pesos. The breakdown of this income is as follows: the first and largest, derived from the resources of the inactive accounts of people in the previously established age ranges, for an amount of five thousand 61 million pesos; the second, corresponding to 75% of the net remainders obtained by the Institute to Return What was Stolen to the People, which contributed 73.9 million pesos; and a third item, derived from the collection of debts pending payment to the ISSSTE, which contributed 24.4 million pesos. This diversification of financing sources seeks to provide long-term sustainability to the Fund.
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