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When corporate pension plan sponsors faced significant underfunding and long-duration liabilities, along with persistent low interest rates, after the global financial crisis, many pursued liability-driven-investment programs to address the critical problem.

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NEPC’s annual Corporate Defined Benefit Peer Study and Survey, released in April, showed plans did not de-risk further in 2025, with the average fixed-income allocation across the consultancy’s peer group roughly unchanged year-over-year.

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Matt Maleri, head of insurance at NEPC, says some pension plans are selling their long-duration fixed-income holdings, something considered unlikely five or 10 years ago, and buying in the belly of the yield curve. But he hesitates to say pension funds will no longer buy longer-duration debt.

“There are still many plans that need to buy long-duration fixed income, and there will be many that continue to hold it, but certainly you’re seeing a more emphasis and a bigger shift toward intermediate duration,” Maleri says.

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Maleri says NEPC is not sold on the idea that all the bond alternatives are perfect liability matches, but for plans with heavy fixed-income and hedging assets, exploring these alternatives as diversifiers makes sense.

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Maleri says NEPC is seeing many plans stick with their current investment managers, but change their mandates, such as moving into intermediate-duration bonds from long-duration bonds. Plan sponsors may need to use specialist firms to invest in nontraditional hedges, although he says more traditional LDI players are starting to offer these kinds of diversifying asset classes.

“They know they have an audience that is going to be a natural buyer of them,” he says.

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