About the data

401k Lookup joins two public sources into one history per retirement plan. This page explains what they are and exactly what we do with them.

Form 5500 annual reports

Almost every private-sector 401(k), pension and profit-sharing plan must file a Form 5500 annual report with the U.S. Department of Labor's Employee Benefits Security Administration (EBSA). It gives the plan's name and number, the sponsoring employer and its tax ID (EIN), the plan administrator's address and phone, how many people are in the plan and, for larger plans, its assets (Schedule H) and the companies paid to run it (Schedule C). EBSA publishes every filing as open data, refreshed monthly.

We read plan years 2009 to 2025: 727,058 annual reports from 69,920 retirement plans. For each plan and year we use the latest filing the Department accepted, so amended reports replace the originals. Health and other welfare plans are left out.

The PBGC's trusteed plans

The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation publishes the list of pension plans it has taken over (5,175 plans), with the sponsor, termination and trusteeship dates, and the number of people in each plan. We join it to the annual reports by EIN and plan number.

How a plan's history is built

• One plan, many years. A plan is identified by its sponsor's EIN and its three-digit plan number. When an employer re-files a plan under a new EIN, the form names the previous sponsor and plan number, and we join the two.
• Recordkeeper. From the plan's Schedule C we take the provider whose service codes say recordkeeping (code 15) or recordkeeping fees (code 64), and if several do, the best paid. Provider names are grouped under their brand, so "Fidelity Investments Institutional Operations Company" shows as Fidelity. Plans under 100 participants do not file Schedule C.
• Status. A plan is active if it filed for 2023 or later. It is closed if its last report is marked final, merged if its last reports list a plan its assets were transferred to, and taken over by the PBGC if it is on the PBGC's list. A plan with no report since earlier years and no final report is shown as having stopped filing.
• Participants is the plan's own count at the end of the year, which includes former employees and retirees. Since 2023, 401(k) plans count only people with a balance, so some counts drop that year.

How employers are grouped

Plans are grouped under one employer when they share a sponsor EIN, or when their sponsor names match after removing punctuation and legal endings (Inc, LLC) and the sponsors are in the same state. The page is named after the sponsor of the employer's largest plan in its latest year, and lists the other names it filed under. An employer gets a page when its plans together reached 5,000 or more participants in some year, or, for a pension the PBGC took over before 2009, when that many people were in it. That is 5,364 employers.

What we leave out

• People's names. The filings carry the names of the people who signed them and of the preparers. We never read those columns. Where a plan administrator is a named individual, we show "Plan administrator" with the plan's address and phone instead of the name.
• Small employers. Small plans are often filed by sole proprietors with home addresses, so employers below the size above are never named.
• Accounts. The filings say nothing about any one person. We cannot tell you whether you have money in a plan; the plan or its recordkeeper can.

Limits you should know about

• Contact details are what the plan filed for the year shown, and can go out of date. If a number no longer works, call the recordkeeper or the employer's benefits office.
• The newest form year is still filling up: plans can file until mid-October of the following year.
• Grouping by name can occasionally join two employers that share a name in one state, or keep apart parts of one company that file under different names. Tell us if you spot one.
• Filings before 2009 use a different format and are not included yet, apart from the PBGC list.

Credit

Sources: U.S. Department of Labor, Employee Benefits Security Administration; Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. Both are works of the U.S. government and in the public domain. 401k Lookup is independent and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Department of Labor, the PBGC, any employer or any plan provider. It is not financial or legal advice.