The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp.'s deficit hit a record $35.6 billion in fiscal 2013, the agency said Friday.

The deficit in the PBGC's insurance program for single-employer plans fell to $27.4 billion, down from $29.1 billion in fiscal 2012. But that decline was more than offset by a sharp rise in the deficit in the agency's insurance program covering multiemployer plans. The multiemployer program deficit jumped to $8.2 billion, up from $5.2 billion in fiscal 2012, and the agency said more multiemployer plans will fail in the coming years.

“We should not let the problems of a few plans overshadow the reliable retirement security provided by the majority, but neither can we ignore them,” PBGC Director Josh Gotbaum said in a statement.

During fiscal 2013, the PBGC took over 111 plans from financially ailing or failed employers, down from 155 the prior year. It paid about $5.5 billion to participants in failed single-employer plans, about the same as fiscal 2012.

The PBGC said its potential exposure to future pension losses from financially weak companies was about $292 billion in fiscal 2013 compared with about $295 billion in fiscal 2012.

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The record deficit comes at a time when PBGC faces other challenges as employers try to reduce the size of their pension plans by offering certain participants the option to convert their monthly annuity to a cash lump-sum payment and/or transferring — as Verizon Communications Inc. and General Motors Co. did last year and SPX Corp. announced this week — benefit obligations to an insurer through purchasing a group annuity.

Either approach means less premium income for the PBGC, which uses that revenue to help pay benefits to participants in failed plans the agency has taken over.

The base premium, currently at $42 per plan participant, will increase to $49 in 2014. In addition, the premium surcharge paid by employers with underfunded plans will increase to $14 per $1,000 of plan underfunding in 2014. The current surcharge is $9 per $1,000 of underfunding.

Those premium increases were mandated under legislation Congress passed in 2012.