Reference

Rate Watch

Second Wind tracks the official rate books AND the association member letters — here's everything that changed.

1. Effective January 1, 2027

   What changes on the CAHP plans next January

   The 2027 Evidence of Coverage booklets are out, so these are known now rather than in January. On the Basic plan: out-of-network inpatient mental-health and substance-use care improves sharply, from 60/40 coinsurance to 90/10, with the $540 daily hospital limit removed for that care; the out-of-network emergency-room copay for mental health and substance use becomes $50, or $25 if you are admitted; infertility DIAGNOSIS becomes a covered benefit, with the old exclusion narrowed to match; weight-loss GLP-1 drugs become available at a $100 copay, and the blanket anorexiant exclusion is deleted; and after two 30-day retail fills, a maintenance prescription must move to 90-day supply. On the Medicare Supplement, SilverSneakers is added at no cost. One caution on the mental-health change: the 2027 Table of Allowances was not edited to match the change page, so the two parts of the booklet disagree about whether the daily limit still applies to that care — we follow the change page and are watching it. Premium tables in every 2027 booklet print placeholder figures marked TBD; real rates come from the CalPERS rate sheets and are loaded at the January refresh.

   CAHP Health Benefits — 2027 Evidence of Coverage booklets

2. August 28, 2026

   The out-of-network hospital figure was one service area's, and the whole warning now expires at 65

   Reading the CAHP Evidence of Coverage booklets end to end corrected two things. First the number: we have been saying a non-emergency hospital stay outside the plan's network pays $522 a day. The booklet's Table of Allowances schedules $540 a day in most service areas and $580 in service area 4, and pays at most 90 percent of the scheduled amount — so $486 a day in the typical case, and $522 only in area 4. We had been printing one service area's figure as everyone's, and it credited the plan with $36 a day it does not pay. The illustrative four-night stay in the worst case therefore moves from $77,912 to $78,056. Which counties are area 4 cannot be sourced: both years' booklets refer to a service-area definition that appears in neither of them, so we model the typical case and name the other rather than guess where you live. Second, and larger: the out-of-state problem has an end date. The CAHP Medicare Supplement covers care anywhere in the United States and its territories, and pays any provider who accepts Medicare assignment — no network, no out-of-state affidavit. So the risk runs from separation to your 65th birthday and stops there, which turns a permanent warning into a planning question about the gap years. Two facts that were missing travel with it: the unpaid balance above the daily schedule never counts toward your out-of-pocket maximum, which is why the exposure has no ceiling, and an emergency admission is paid at 90 percent of reasonable charges with the daily schedule not applying at all.

   CAHP Evidence of Coverage (Basic + Supplement to Medicare), 2026 and 2027

3. August 19, 2026

   Today-mode CHP projections now earn Senior Officer pay as you serve into it

   If you enter your pay as today's salary, your projection used to carry that number forward on raises alone — which quietly assumed you would never reach a seniority tier you have not reached yet. Senior CHP Officer pay is a bargained differential that starts at eighteen years and climbs to twelve percent of base: two percent at eighteen years, three at nineteen, four at twenty, five at twenty-one, six at twenty-two, eight at twenty-five, ten at twenty-seven and twelve at twenty-eight. The tiers are non-cumulative, so only the highest one you have reached applies. Your projection now adds the tiers you will cross between today and your final-compensation window, and only those — whatever you already qualify for is inside the number you typed, so it is never counted twice. This was a systematic understatement, and it was worst for exactly the people with the most service ahead of them: a mid-career officer retiring at twenty-eight years was projecting a pension built on pay that never earned a single rung of the ladder. The differential counts time served in the class as a sworn member of the CHP, which is not the same as your CalPERS service credit — purchased service and prior state service do not move it, so the projection reads it from your hire date alone and assumes that date is your CHP appointment. Laterals and re-hires whose CHP time differs from their hire date should enter pay as an at-retirement figure instead. It also assumes you meet the performance standards the differential is conditioned on, which is near-universal but is an assumption, and it applies the percentage to the pay you entered rather than to base salary alone, so if your pay includes a premium differential the step-up runs a little high. Nothing changes if you enter your pay as an at-retirement figure — that number is yours and it already includes what you expect to be earning — and nothing changes for ranks above Sergeant, which the differential does not cover.

   BU-5 (CAHP) MOU §27 and CalHR Pay Differential 167 (rev. July 1, 2024)

4. August 15, 2026

   Leave balances can now be entered as today's numbers, and cash-outs are priced at your pay on the way out

   Your profile's sick leave and payable leave asked for the hours you expect to have at separation — a number no document you can read actually gives you. Cal Employee Connect shows today's balances, your earnings statement shows today's balances, so everyone was doing the projection in their head, without an accrual rate and without a cap. You can now enter today's balance instead and we will carry it forward for you, bank by bank, using the rates and ceilings in your own contract. For CHP that means vacation earning your service-tier rate under BU-5 MOU section 48 — eight, eleven, thirteen, fourteen then fifteen hours a month as you pass seven months, thirty-seven months, one hundred twenty-one months, one hundred eighty-one months and two hundred forty-one months of service — plus the hundred and sixty-four hours a year of holiday-in-lieu credit that section 47 adds on top, twelve hours most months and twenty-two in April and July. Sick leave earns eight hours a month with no ceiling. The Personal Leave Program earns eight hours a month and stops you out of the program at two hundred forty hours; because enrollment is approved one fiscal year at a time there is no published end date, so we stop the accrual at the end of your current contract and say so. Caps matter more than they look: vacation carry-over is limited to nine hundred and twenty-four hours from one calendar year to the next, and for an officer seven years out an uncapped projection would have shown more than two thousand six hundred hours of vacation against a real figure near nine hundred — six figures of cash that does not exist. That limit is not a wall, though, and we do not present it as one: your balance can run above it during a year, separation pays your actual credits, and the Commissioner may allow more to carry over for emergency assignments, a compensable injury, jury duty, or when the Department cannot reduce balances for operational reasons. How much leave you expect to spend before you go is your own assumption and starts at zero — we never infer it from a paystub. Two numbers move with this. If you entered your pay as today's salary, your leave cash-out is now priced at your projected hourly rate on your separation date rather than today's rate, which is what you will actually be paid; it was understating, and by more the further out you are. And the DROP calculator's assumed vacation accrual during the program moved from a hundred and sixty hours a year to three hundred and thirty-two, because a hundred and sixty was below the hundred and sixty-four hours of holiday-in-lieu credit alone, before a single hour of the accrual rate. Nothing changes for profiles that keep entering leave as an at-separation figure. Leave accrual rates and caps have only been verified against the CHP contract; CAL FIRE and CDCR members can enter their own rates and their balances carry forward flat until then.

   BU-5 (CAHP) Memorandum of Understanding, July 2024 – July 2027

5. August 14, 2026

   Raise Watch bars now show total pensionable rate movement

   The CHP raise chart used to show general salary increases only. It now shows everything that moved the rate your pension is calculated on, which changes four years. In 2007 through 2010, officers were phasing in a CalPERS employee retirement contribution under the 2006–2010 contract, and each step came with a matching salary increase — money that raised your pensionable rate but was deliberately offset so take-home pay stayed level. Those increases were real for your pension and the old chart left them out. With them included, 2007 reads 8.07% instead of 6.1%, 2008 reads 6.08% instead of 4.1%, and 2009 and 2010 are no longer zero years at 1.95% and 2.00% — though none of that was a parity raise, because in those two years the survey's own result was redirected to retiree-health and pension funding before it could become salary. Three years remain at 0%: 2011, 2012 and 2020. Two things did NOT change. Your assumed annual raise is still 3.5%, because that figure is built on the parity-raise record with the one-time contribution phase-in removed — it was a structural event that will not repeat, and assuming it forward would overstate every projection. And no percentage in the history was corrected; every year still matches the CalHR pay letter that implemented it.

   California Government Code § 19827 — the total-compensation survey

6. August 13, 2026

   CHP default raise assumption re-derived: 4.0% → 3.5%/yr

   The assumed annual raise the app starts CHP members with went from 4.0% to 3.5%, re-derived from the twenty-year record of BU-5's July general salary increases rather than from the most recent decade alone. Government Code 19827 sizes that raise to a total-compensation survey of five other agencies — the LAPD, the LA County Sheriff, Oakland PD, San Diego PD, and San Francisco PD — so it is set by their bargaining, not by a schedule, and the longest clean record is the honest basis for assuming it forward. Across the twenty increases from 2006 through 2025 the arithmetic mean is 3.56% a year and the compound annual growth rate is 3.52%, which rounds to 3.5%. The 4.0% it replaces was the 2015–2025 average of about 4.1%: that window opens just after the post-2008 austerity years, so it contains none of them while containing the 2021–2023 catch-up in full — the survey's best decade read as if it were its normal one. Both numbers are defensible and the eleven-year figure is still shown on your profile, alongside what the average hides: five of the twenty years were 0%, four of them consecutively from 2009 through 2012, against a 7.9% jump in 2023. Raise Watch now charts all twenty years rather than eleven, each with the pay letter or survey report behind it, and flags the seven years where the rate and the paycheck moved differently. These are rate raises — what CalPERS uses for your pension — not take-home; the Personal Leave Program has cash-offset them since July 2025, but final compensation is still reported at the unreduced rate, so your pension estimate is unaffected. This is a starting assumption you can change on your profile at any time.

   California Government Code § 19827 — the total-compensation survey

7. August 7, 2026

   CAL FIRE default raise assumption re-derived: 2.5% → 3.5%/yr

   The assumed annual raise the app starts CAL FIRE members with went from 2.5% to 3.5%, re-derived from the CalHR pay letters that actually implemented BU-8's raises rather than from summary documents. It is the compound annual growth of base pay from January 2015 through October 2025 — Pay Letter 15-02 to Pay Letter 25-33, the first and last unit-wide actions — counting the six general salary increases plus the broad market special salary adjustments, and traced through Fire Apparatus Engineer (class 1077) at the range maximum. Two things are deliberately left out: the November 2024 conversion to the 66-hour workweek, which raised salary ranges 16.98% but moved pay from the overtime line to the base line rather than adding any, and the two narrow adjustments that reached only specialty classes and only Fire Fighter I / Fire Lookout. The result is 3.61%/yr, rounded to 3.5%. Because BU-8's 2017–2021 increases were class-specific, the honest range across class choices is 3.06%–3.61%, and the conservative bracket — general salary increases alone, with every market adjustment stripped out — is 1.43%/yr. This is a starting assumption you can change on your profile: recent CAL FIRE contracts have run leaner than the ten-year average, and no raise is scheduled before the MOU expires June 30, 2027.

   CalHR Pay Letter 25-33 (the last BU-8 general salary increase)

8. July 2026

   Plan deductibles & out-of-pocket maximums added

   We added in-network deductibles and out-of-pocket maximums for every CalPERS health plan, transcribed from the official 2026 Health Benefit Summary, plus a worst-case-year estimate and an out-of-state hospital-stay scenario. This lets the tool compare true cost exposure, not just the monthly premium — an association plan can have the lowest premium and still leave you the most exposed.

   CalPERS 2026 Health Benefit Summary

9. July 29, 2026

   CalPERS announces 2027 health plan changes: new Sutter HMO, UHC Basic plans exit

   CalPERS announced the Board-approved 2027 health plan changes (approved July 14, 2026; also sent as a member email). Six items: a new Sutter Health Plan HMO Basic option launches in Placer, Sacramento, San Joaquin, Stanislaus, Solano, and Yolo counties; Blue Shield EPO expands into Alpine, Amador, El Dorado, Nevada, Placer, San Bernardino, Sutter, and Yuba counties; Kaiser HMO and Kaiser Senior Advantage both expand into northwestern Nevada (Carson City, Douglas, Lyon, Storey, and Washoe counties); UnitedHealthcare's Basic HMOs — SignatureValue Alliance and SignatureValue Harmony — exit every county effective January 1, 2027 (the separate UnitedHealthcare Group Medicare Advantage PPO is unaffected); Blue Shield and UnitedHealthcare Medicare Advantage PPO members will get two ID cards, one for medical and one for pharmacy, with no coverage change; and, effective July 1, 2027, every Basic plan — HMO under SB 729 and PPO by a separate Board vote — adds infertility/family-building coverage. Open Enrollment runs September 14–October 9, 2026, and final 2027 premiums post to the Plans & Rates page around September 8. Sutter's full covered-ZIP list and the Blue Shield/Kaiser expansion ZIP codes were still rolling out as of this writing — verify your address before enrolling.

   CalPERS Annual Health Plan Changes (2027)

10. July 2026

    Location data rebuilt on public federal sources

    The Location Comparison dataset was rebuilt from public-domain U.S. government data — BEA Regional Price Parities (cost of living), NOAA 1991–2020 Climate Normals (climate), CMS Care Compare (hospitals + star ratings), and the FBI Crime Data Explorer (crime) — with the source, geography, and vintage recorded for every figure. Cost-of-living numbers are now metro-level RPPs (100 = U.S. average), whose housing component is rents-based, so spreads look narrower than the prior home-price-style index. Fields with no verifiable city-level federal source (groceries, transportation, sunny days) were removed rather than approximated.

    BEA Regional Price Parities

11. June 1, 2026

    CAHP moved Arizona/Nevada/Oregon retirees in-network

    Effective June 1, 2026, the CAHP Health Benefits Trust moved retirees living in Arizona, Nevada, and Oregon from the Out-of-State Group (1855RR) to the Basic Retiree Group (1855RD), making Anthem's Prudent Buyer network in-network in those three states — the same 90/10 coverage as in California. This shipped via a CAHP member letter, not the CalPERS rate book: the premiums never changed, only the coverage geography. Everywhere beyond CA/AZ/NV/OR, non-emergency inpatient care is still limited to a daily schedule — see the August 28, 2026 entry, which corrects the figure this entry originally carried.

    CAHP Health Benefits

12. January 2026

    2026 premiums, contribution amounts & PEPRA limits loaded

    The annual refresh: 2026 health premiums (in- and out-of-state), the 100/90 and 80/80 employer-contribution amounts, and the PEPRA pensionable-compensation limits were loaded from the official CalPERS publications. These drive every premium, gap-cost, and pension-cap figure in the app for the 2026 plan year.

    CalPERS Retiree Plans & Rates

13. June 27, 2025

    California military-retirement exclusion enacted

    California enacted a partial exemption for military retirement pay (AB 53 / SB 132), signed June 27, 2025: up to $20,000 excluded from state tax for tax years 2025–2029, subject to income limits. Before this, California fully taxed military retirement. The Tax Analyzer reflects the exemption in its state-by-state military-pension treatment.

    California FTB — Military