This study investigated retirement planning involvement and challenges encountered by staff of public universities in Rivers State. Two objectives, two research questions and two hypotheses guided the study. The study adopted the descriptive design. The population of the study was 9,551 staff in the three public universities in Rivers State. The sample was 1,173, comprising 490 teaching staff, 344 senior and 339 junior non-teaching staff of the three public universities in the state. Stratified random sampling technique was used to draw the sample. The instrument used to generate data was a self-structured 16-item questionnaire titled ‘Retirement Planning Awareness and Planning Options among Staff of Public Universities Questionnaire’. Cronbach’s alpha was used to establish the reliability co-efficient of the instrument at 0.81. The research questions were answered using mean, while the hypotheses were tested at 0.05 significant level using analysis of variance (ANOVA). The study revealed among others that university staffs were highly involved in their retirement planning activities. Senior non-teaching staffs were more involved in their retirement planning than teaching and junior non-teaching staff. The study also showed that challenges that impedes university staffs’ involvement in requirement planning included high cost of maintaining health insurance policy, large family size and associated high expenses, lack of financial knowledge, rising inflation rate that depletes investible funds, etc. This study recommended that university authorities should ensure that teaching staff and all cadres of non-teaching staff are well-informed and carried along in all retirement planning matters that may benefit employees.