Labor & Employment Law Daily Wrap Up, SUPREME COURT DOCKET—High Court hears arguments today on employer withdrawal liability calculations under ERISA, (Jan 20, 2026)

By Brandi O. Brown, J.D.

The Court has been asked to resolve a split on the timing of the actuarial assumptions used for those calculations.

Today, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in M & K Employee Solutions, LLC v. Trustees of the IAM National Pension Fund, which is intended to resolve a circuit split regarding the appropriate date to use for actuarial assumptions underlying the withdrawal liability calculation for when an employer withdraws from an underfunded multiemployer pension plan. In the decision below, the D.C. Circuit held that a plan could base withdrawal liability on actuarial assumptions adopted after the prior plan year, rather than those in place as of the last day of the prior year, which was the general practice until 2020, when the Second Circuit diverged in National Retirement Fund v. Metz Culinary Management Inc. The D.C. Circuit declined to follow Metz.

Last June, in order to resolve this circuit split, the Court granted the cert petition in an order that it amended a few days later, to consider “Whether 29 U. S. C. § 1391’s instruction to compute withdrawal liability “as of the end of the plan year” requires the plan to base the computation on the actuarial assumptions most recently adopted before the end of the year, or allows the plan to use different actuarial assumptions that were adopted after, but based on information available as of, the end of the year.”

At the Court’s request, the Solicitor General submitted a brief, which encouraged the Court to grant the petition and resolve the conflict. Several other briefs were filed by interested amici.

The case is Docket No. 23-1209.

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