NISOURCE INC.

13. Pension and Other Postemployment Benefits

We provide defined contribution plans and noncontributory defined benefit retirement plans that cover certain of our employees. Benefits under the defined benefit retirement plans reflect the employees' compensation, years of service and age at retirement. Additionally, we provide health care and life insurance benefits for certain retired employees. Certain active employees may become eligible for these benefits if they reach retirement age while working for us. The expected cost of such benefits is accrued during the employees' years of service. We determined that, for certain rate-regulated subsidiaries, the future recovery of postretirement benefit costs is probable, and we record regulatory assets and liabilities for amounts that would otherwise have been recorded to expense or accumulated other comprehensive loss. Current rates of rate-regulated companies include postretirement benefit costs, including amortization of the regulatory assets and liabilities that arose prior to inclusion of these costs in rates. For most plans, cash contributions are remitted to grantor trusts.

For the nine months ended September 30, 2026 and 2025, we contributed $3.1 million and $1.5 million, respectively, to our pension plans and $15.1 million and $15.4 million, respectively, to our OPEB plans.

The following table provides the components of the plans' actuarially determined net periodic benefit cost for the three and nine months ended September 30, 2026 and 2025:

During the three months ended September 30, 2026, one of our qualified pension plans met the requirement for settlement accounting. A one-time settlement charge of $4.7 million was recorded during the three months ended September 30, 2026.