CalPERS Q4 2025 13F: The Largest U.S. Public Pension Fund Doubles Down on Mega-Cap Leadership

CalPERS Q4 2025 13F: The Largest U.S. Public Pension Fund Doubles Down on Mega-Cap Leadership

CalPERS entered the end of 2025 with unusual scale even by institutional standards: the largest U.S. public pension fund reported $174.90 billion in 13F AUM for Q4 2025, carried by a concentrated group of public-market winners led by VOO, Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, and Alphabet Class A. The filing is a reminder that even a giant pension allocator is still letting public equities do a lot of heavy lifting inside the reportable slice of its portfolio.

That distinction matters. CalPERS’ official investment facts and trust-level review place total fund assets above $556 billion in mid-2025, so the 13F captures only the listed U.S. equity and certain reportable securities sleeve — not the whole pension machine. Still, for anyone tracking institutional signals, the Q4 filing is a sharp read on where CalPERS had real public-market exposure as 2026 began.

TL;DR

• Reported Q4 2025 13F AUM: $174.90B.
• WhaleScore: 73.25.
• Top holding: VOO at $19.81B, or 11.89% of reported AUM.
• Top four holdings — VOO, NVDA, MSFT, and AAPL — accounted for roughly 32.5% of reported 13F AUM.
• 13F AUM rose from $142.20B in Q1 2024 to $174.90B in Q4 2025, a gain of about 23% across eight quarters.
• The holding count slid to 1,086, down from 1,169 in Q1 2024, suggesting a gradually tighter public-equity book.

The public-markets message is hard to miss

CalPERS’ biggest disclosed position is not a single company but the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF, worth $19.81B. That matters because it frames the rest of the filing: yes, this is one of the biggest public pension investors in the world, but its reportable U.S. equity sleeve still leans heavily on broad beta plus mega-cap growth. The next positions — Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, Broadcom, and Amazon — are exactly where market leadership sat at the end of 2025.

That does not mean CalPERS is behaving like a momentum hedge fund. Its investment policies, investment organization materials, and Total Fund Investment Policy all emphasize long-horizon, risk-aware portfolio construction. But the Q4 2025 13F still tells investors something useful: when the largest U.S. public pension fund discloses its U.S. holdings, the winners are overwhelmingly passive exposure and dominant platform companies.

Top holdings: passive core, AI winners, and platform scale

The top of the book is tightly clustered around the names that dominated U.S. large-cap performance. Nvidia alone reached $14.24B, while Microsoft and Apple combined for another $20.11B. Two share classes of Alphabet appeared in the top 10, and Tesla still cracked the list. For a pension allocator, that is not an exotic message — it is a very public affirmation that market-cap leadership remained difficult to avoid.

If you combine VOO with the next three positions, nearly one-third of reported 13F AUM sits in four lines. That is not reckless concentration for a fund this size, but it does underline how strongly the disclosed book is anchored to the benchmark complex and the biggest U.S. technology franchises.

Why the AUM trend matters more than any single ticker

CalPERS’ eight-quarter 13F AUM path is almost a straight line higher: $142.20B in Q1 2024, $149.52B by Q4 2024, $156.97B by Q2 2025, $167.04B by Q3 2025, and now $174.90B in Q4 2025. That is a powerful upward march in the public-equity sleeve even as the holding count trends down. In plain English: the fund’s reportable U.S. portfolio became more valuable while the list of names became slightly leaner.

That fits the broader institutional backdrop shown in CalPERS’ PERF portfolio report and annual investment report: public equity remains the workhorse even as CalPERS continues pushing more capital toward private markets at the total-fund level.

Retail investor read-through: what should you actually take away?

First, the filing strengthens the case that mega-cap leadership was not just a retail or hedge-fund story. One of the most systemically important long-duration allocators in U.S. markets also had huge dollar exposure to the same leaders. Second, the size of the VOO line tells you CalPERS is comfortable letting low-cost index exposure absorb a large chunk of the public-equity job. Third, the gap between the 13F portfolio and the total fund is crucial: anyone reading the filing as a full blueprint for CalPERS is missing the much larger private equity, fixed income, real assets, and private debt engine described in official CalPERS materials.

For stock pickers, that means this filing is more useful as a signal filter than a copy-trading list. When a pension fund of this size keeps such enormous exposure to the benchmark and the largest tech franchises, it suggests those names remained core liquidity, policy, and conviction holdings at year-end — not tactical curiosities.

Key source documents and further reading

• SEC EDGAR company page for CalPERS
• CalPERS Q4 2025 13F filing text
• CalPERS Facts at a Glance — Investments
• CalPERS Trust Level Review as of June 30, 2025
• PERF Portfolio & Partnership Report as of June 30, 2025
• CalPERS Total Fund Investment Policy
• CalPERS investment policies hub
• CalPERS investment organization overview
• CalPERS annual investment report
• CalPERS profile on 13F Insight

Bottom line: CalPERS’ Q4 2025 13F is not a surprise in style, but it is a high-signal confirmation. The biggest public pension fund in the U.S. closed the year with enormous exposure to passive beta and the same mega-cap leaders that defined the market’s upper tier.