New Trump Account rules let governments and charities fund equal contributions for every eligible child in a class defined by birth year and geography, and those contributions can now arrive as publicly traded stock rather than cash. Donated stock generally must be held for five years before it is sold and reinvested in the index funds the accounts otherwise require. Until accounts are claimed, the assets of automatically created accounts are invested together through a master trust while Treasury keeps ownership records for each child. The preamble names the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation's $6.25 billion pledge, to children born between 2016 and 2024 in lower-income ZIP codes, as the kind of giving the rules are designed to attract, and it gives charitable donors certainty that these contributions qualify for deductions. Comments on the companion proposed rule are due 60 days after it publishes in the Federal Register.

The IRS is clearing out old guidance. Notice 2026-58 declares 71 revenue rulings, revenue procedures, notices, and announcements obsolete under the administration's deregulatory executive orders, the third round in the effort after earlier notices covering 9 and 83 documents. Nothing here repeals a current benefit protection. The listed items are expired or superseded, including Notice 96-8, the 1996 guidance on calculating lump sum distributions from cash balance plans, which Congress superseded in the Pension Protection Act of 2006, and financial-crisis-era funding relief for multiemployer pension plans whose election windows closed years ago. Sponsors with plan documents or procedures that still cite any listed item should confirm what replaced it.

A day before the IRS began notifying workers about the saver's match, the senator who wrote it proposed doubling it. Senate Finance Committee Ranking Member Ron Wyden introduced the Savers Match Enhancement Act, which would raise the federal match from 50 percent to 100 percent of the first $2,000 saved, for a maximum of $2,000 a year, index that cap to inflation, roughly double the income phaseout ranges so more middle-income workers qualify, and convert the match from a pretax deposit into an after-tax Roth contribution. For a single filer, eligibility would phase out between $42,500 and $57,500 instead of the current $20,500 to $35,500. The match program itself starts in 2027, and the increase remains a proposal.

Standardized rollover forms could reduce paperwork, but they will not fix retirement plan transfers on their own, Tom Hawkins argues. He credits Notice 2026-49's four model forms and five-step workflow for attacking the paper-and-fax rollover process, then asks why plan-to-plan transfers stayed broken while securities transfers and payments were automated decades ago. His answer is that portability requires industrywide cooperation no single recordkeeper is paid to build, and that forms alone will not finish the job without shared systems for moving retirement money between providers.

Proposition 42 on California's November ballot targets taxes on the value of retirement accounts and other personal property, not the income taxes Californians already pay on withdrawals. The measure would amend the state constitution to prohibit any new state tax on the ownership of personal property, meaning everything people own other than real estate, and would bar certain retroactive taxes, nullifying any conflicting tax enacted after January 1, 2026. It responds to asset-tax proposals floated in the legislature in 2019, 2022, and 2024, none of which became law. A study commissioned by the measure's supporters estimates that a hypothetical 1 percent annual tax on retirement assets, if one were ever enacted, could cut retirement income by 20 to 37 percent over a career and push retirement back three to seven years. Supporters have raised $73.8 million for the measure against about $362,000 on the other side.

Proxy voting choice is quietly becoming a plan feature. Vanguard's new How Investors Vote report counts 507,000 investors in its Investor Choice program, up from 82,000 last year, with participating assets rising from $9 billion to $151 billion. The retirement-plan side is the notable part. Nearly 80 plan sponsors representing more than one million participants and $120 billion in assets now let participants choose how shares held by their index funds are voted on corporate matters, and Vanguard says the program expands to all of its U.S. equity index funds in 2027. Sponsors weighing governance questions from participants or committees now have a mainstream option to point to.

Federal oversight of the ACA marketplaces just escalated sharply. In late August, CMS canceled about 315,000 policies covering more than 760,000 people, roughly 4 percent of marketplace enrollment, after concluding the enrollments were unauthorized, and it plans to investigate 440,000 more. An interim final rule published September 23 then froze new agent and broker registrations for the federally facilitated marketplaces for the 2027 plan year, a moratorium expected to run to February 1, 2027. CMS expects to recover about $2.2 billion in advance premium tax credits, and enrollees who did not answer a 30-day verification request lost coverage, which Morgan Lewis notes has stakeholders asking whether legitimate enrollments were swept in. Employers are not directly regulated here, but a tightened individual market changes the fallback for COBRA-eligible workers, part-timers, and early retirees, with open enrollment starting November 1.

Two benefits deadlines are approaching. Health plans with prescription drug coverage must tell Medicare-eligible individuals before October 15 whether the coverage is creditable, meaning expected to pay, on average, at least as much as standard Medicare prescription drug coverage, so recipients can decide about Part D during Medicare open enrollment, which runs October 15 through December 7. Because employers rarely know which spouses and dependents are on Medicare, Venable recommends simply sending the notice to everyone enrolled in or eligible for the health plan, using the CMS model notices. The separate online disclosure to CMS is due within 60 days after the plan year begins. October 15 is also the extended Form 5500 deadline for calendar-year plans that filed a Form 5558 extension by July 31.

Mental health parity enforcement has narrowed but not stopped. With the 2024 parity rule shelved during litigation, the Labor Department enforces the 2013 regulations, and its September guidance concentrates on three targets, exclusions that apply only to mental health and substance use benefits, medical necessity and utilization review processes, and network adequacy, meaning whether enough providers are actually available. Employers should check whether their plans exclude autism therapies or addiction medications while covering comparable medical care, use an employee assistance program as a gatekeeper to care, let actual claims practice diverge from written terms, or discount behavioral providers more deeply than medical ones in reimbursement formulas. They should also confirm vendors can produce medical necessity criteria promptly on request.

The IRS has moved from warning to auditing on fixed indemnity wellness arrangements marketed as payroll tax savers. The designs promise FICA savings and higher take-home pay, most commonly by paying employees back a portion of pre-tax premiums and claiming the payments are excluded from income, sometimes with benefits paid even when no medical expense was ever incurred. The agency has disagreed with that treatment in guidance since 2016 and said in 2024 that its concerns had escalated. Employers whose arrangements fail an audit could owe the taxes they should have withheld, plus penalties and interest. Any sponsor pitched one of these programs, or already in one, should have the promoter's tax opinion reviewed by counsel that does not profit from the sale.

Milliman puts numbers on a question more sponsors are asking, whether to move from traditional drug rebates, money the pharmacy benefit manager returns to the plan months after prescriptions are filled, to models where the discount is applied at the pharmacy counter. Comparing the two on annual cost alone makes rebates look better than they are, because during a transition the plan still collects prior-year rebates while paying lower net prices, and a dollar of discount today is worth more than the same dollar returned months later. Under the authors' assumptions, a net price model is worth about $1.25 per member per month to the plan sponsor compared with a traditional rebate arrangement, with members gaining through lower cost sharing on brand and specialty drugs. For sponsors with rebate-dependent budgets, the transition math is the part worth handing to the consultant.

KFF's refreshed polling lands as open enrollment season starts, and the numbers explain what employees are feeling. Health care costs top the list of family financial worries, ahead of housing, food, and utilities, with 27 percent of adults very worried about affording care. About 28 percent skipped or postponed care in the past year because of cost, 22 percent had problems paying medical bills, and 43 percent did not take medication as prescribed for cost reasons, including 19 percent who cut pills in half or skipped doses. For benefits teams writing open enrollment communications, this is the context employees bring to every premium and deductible number.

The FTC and the states have taken over where HIPAA stops on health data from website trackers. Goodwin's survey starts from the July action against telehealth platform Hims & Hers over tracking code that shared customer information with advertising platforms, and maps the wider landscape after a 2024 court ruling curbed HHS's position that tracking data from website visitors who are not logged in counts as protected health information. California wiretap and privacy statutes, Washington's My Health My Data Act, and more than 20 other state laws now regulate consumer health data outside HIPAA. Employers should check their wellness portals, benefits tools, and plan websites for tracking technology that shares information with advertising companies. HIPAA is not the only privacy law that may apply.

The cuts come from the District's Fiscal Year 2027 Budget Support Act. The number of available weeks falls only for family caregiving and medical leave. Parental and prenatal leave keep their existing durations, but the lower weekly payment cap applies across the program. Employer obligations are unchanged. The program remains fully employer-funded with payroll deductions still impermissible, and the sliding-scale wage replacement formula, up to 90 percent, stays. The action items are the mandatory workplace notice, which must be updated, and helping workers planning leave around October 1 confirm which benefit limits apply.

California's AB 2054 widens the military-family side of Paid Family Leave. Under existing law, PFL benefits for a family member's "covered active duty" reached only deployments to a foreign country. The amendment covers deployments other than to a foreign country, duty during deployment or training for regular Armed Forces members, and, for reserve and National Guard members, duty during training or a call to federal or state active duty. The change takes effect when the state's claims system is ready or July 1, 2028, whichever comes first.

A published Tenth Circuit decision hands boilermaker retirees a win on three fronts. The multiemployer plan paid early retirement benefits to workers who withdrew completely and refrained from jobs classified under collective bargaining agreements, and the trustees read "withdraw completely" to disqualify retirees who took any job with any contributing employer. The court rejected that reading. The plan's language did not disqualify a retiree who took a job, like one at a sporting goods store, outside the union work the plan covers, and giving trustees discretion to interpret the plan did not let them override its clear terms. The court also revived claims that had been dismissed as too late. The plan could not enforce its two-year deadline to sue because its denial letters had not disclosed that deadline. And a denial letter alone did not establish that retirees knew the trustees had breached their duties, a distinction that revived claims for 66 retirees under a separate three-year filing deadline. Every administrator's denial template should state the deadline to file suit.

A divorce, a records deadline, and a two-year clock ended a former spouse's coverage fight. Mass General Brigham let certain former spouses keep after-tax coverage if the employee updated human resources records by a deadline. The employee did not, and the plan terminated her former husband's coverage. Judge Saylor dismissed the case. The plan's two-year deadline to sue began when it notified the employee that her former husband was no longer eligible. He also never used the plan's 180-day appeal process. The court rejected his four state-law claims, contract, fiduciary, good faith, and negligence, because each depended on interpreting the benefit plan and so was displaced by federal benefits law. If his ex-wife breached the divorce agreement by letting coverage lapse, the court said, that claim belongs in state court against her, not against the plan.

A federal judge declined to let a prostate cancer patient pursue a class action over BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee's denials of proton beam therapy, which the insurer's medical policy treats as investigational for prostate cancer. The proposed class covered people in employer health plans governed by ERISA that BlueCross administers or insures, claiming the designation violated their plan terms and the insurer's fiduciary duties. The court did not decide whether the insurer was right to deny coverage. Judge McDonough found at least 74 people across eight states were denied under the same policy language, and whether that designation violated the plans is a question that can be answered once for everyone. He rejected the insurer's argument that its case-by-case review of unique clinical circumstances made each denial different, since that review happens only because the policy labels the treatment investigational in the first place. Certification still failed because each person's treatment costs and other claimed losses would require substantial individual review. The court left open the possibility of a narrower request.

A closely watched challenge to fertility benefit design ends in dismissal. A lesbian employee of Wellstar Health System sued under Title VII because the medical plan makes women establish infertility either through months of procreative intercourse, which costs nothing, or through rounds of artificial insemination that she must pay for and that do not result in pregnancy, the only path open to her. A magistrate judge had recommended letting the claims proceed under Bostock, the Supreme Court decision holding that firing a worker for being gay or transgender is discrimination because of sex. Judge Brown rejected that recommendation and dismissed the case. In his reading, Bostock requires changing one thing only, the plaintiff's sex, and a similarly situated male employee would not receive the benefit either, because the plan covers only female infertility. The group actually disadvantaged, the judge reasoned, is everyone unable to conceive through intercourse, which includes men and women of all orientations and is not a protected class. The court declined to follow contrary decisions from federal courts in California and Illinois, so the split over fertility benefit design deepens. The class claims were dismissed without prejudice.