The first alert to give equal time to the second proposed rule: what Trump accounts may actually hold during the growth period. Investments must be index tracking mutual funds or ETFs with no leverage and annual fees capped at 0.1 percent of net asset value—actively managed funds, fund of funds structures, and ESG index funds are all ineligible—and trustees must re-verify eligibility every twelve months and dispose of noncompliant holdings within thirty days. On the employer side, two cautions easy to miss: a written employee certification is not enough by itself to verify an account, and contributions escape income tax but remain wages for FICA and FUTA. A safe harbor covers employers that match the $1,000 pilot contribution identically for all non-excluded employees.

The long-running alternative-assets series reaches the proposal's liquidity factor, and the reading is more permissive than sponsors might expect. The DOL's proposed regulation lists six factors for vetting alternatives in participant-directed plans; on liquidity, it says a prudent process may sacrifice some plan or individual level liquidity in pursuit of additional risk adjusted return. The analysis runs on two levels: participant liquidity, where daily trading will remain the practical demand, and plan liquidity, where the question is how hard an option is to remove once chosen. The prediction is that private fund allocations will arrive mostly inside target date funds, which can pair daily participant trading with a 60 to 90 day removal window.

Corporate pension surpluses keep compounding: the funded ratio for the Milliman 100 plans inched up to 112.2 percent as of August 31, a $141 billion surplus, as a 0.92 percent investment return outran a two-basis-point dip in the discount rate to 6.00 percent. The baseline projection now has the ratio at 112.5 percent by year end and 113.5 percent by the end of 2027. That is the backdrop for why pension risk transfer and surplus questions keep landing on sponsor agendas.

Participants barely touched their accounts in August. Average daily net trading was 0.008 percent of balances, the lowest August reading in the index's thirty years of data. When money did move, it went defensive: fixed income was favored on 14 of 21 trading days, with bond funds taking 49 percent of net inflows while large U.S. equity, target date funds, and company stock supplied the outflows. Target date and large-cap equity funds together now hold about 60 percent of all 401(k) assets in the index, up from roughly 40 to 45 percent two decades ago.

A four-page Fast Facts with a generational scorecard drawn from the Survey of Consumer Finances, comparing families at similar life stages. Millennials are the most likely of the three generations to own retirement assets and hold the largest share of their total wealth in them, the fingerprint of the defined benefit to defined contribution shift, while boomer families show by far the lowest median retirement account balance at the comparison point. Useful framing for sponsors weighing how much heavy lifting the 401(k) now does for each cohort.

After House Democratic leadership built an August 31 press conference around affordability—groceries, gas, healthcare—the Insured Retirement Institute wrote to argue that retirement belongs on the list. The letter distills IRI's broader agenda to four asks: an auto-IRA mandate for employers without plans plus a triennial re-enrollment safe harbor and eligibility at 18; wider guaranteed lifetime income access, including annuities inside QDIAs and expanded QLAC eligibility; collective investment trusts for 403(b) plans; and simplified rollovers with in-service distributions to individual retirement annuities at 50.

The fourth quarter calendar for health and welfare sponsors, in one place. October 2 brings QSEHRA and ICHRA notices and Medicare Part D subsidy applications; October 15, creditable coverage notices and extended Form 5500s; December 15, summary annual reports for extension filers; December 29, the employer share of MLR rebates within 90 days of receipt; December 31, gag clause attestations plus WHCRA and Section 1557 notices. A companion checklist covers open enrollment materials—SBCs, Michelle's Law, HIPAA notices, wellness alternative standard disclosures—and the state assessments landing this quarter, from Massachusetts payor assessments to Washington's long term care tax.

A rename, not a rulemaking: on September 3 the Small Business Administration and CMS announced that individual coverage HRAs will now go by CHOICE Arrangements, borrowing the branding from provisions of two House-passed bills that never survived final passage. Nothing structural changes—employers still reimburse individual market or Medicare coverage under the 2019 tri-agency framework—but the administration is signaling more rulemaking ahead, exploring flexibilities to boost adoption that has run well behind the original 800,000-employer projection. CMS has a new landing page for whatever comes next.

Segal's read of the section 129 proposed regulations puts the testing mechanics up front: the eligibility test pairs a reasonable-classification standard with a numerical safe harbor, no more than a quarter of total benefits may flow to five percent owners, and average benefits for the non-highly compensated must reach 55 percent of the HCE average, counting only employees who actually use the program. The correction path may matter most in practice. Certain failures can be cured by reporting excess benefits as taxable income on the affected W-2s by the deadline. Sponsors may rely on the proposed rules now; comments close September 25.

Health plan governance is getting the 401(k) treatment. Benefits attorneys and consultants walk through what sponsors should be doing now: negotiate rebate pass-throughs and oversight rights into PBM contracts before signing, benchmark per-member fees, and collect compensation disclosures from every vendor taking $1,000 or more a year from the plan. The clock behind the advice is the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2026. Its ERISA-fiduciary provisions treat PBMs as covered service providers and require spread pricing out of contracts by August 1, 2029.

The DOL released Field Assistance Bulletin 2026-03 this week with a companion web page that reads like an examiner's checklist, and Seyfarth turns both into a working roadmap. Enforcement will concentrate on three areas: blanket treatment exclusions, where residential eating disorder care and ABA therapy for autism are the named examples; medical necessity and utilization management; and network adequacy and provider reimbursement. Worth underlining: the nonenforcement relief for contested pieces of the 2024 final rule, which the agency is reworking through new rulemaking, changes nothing about the statutory comparative analysis obligation for NQTLs. Since vendors hold most of the data these reviews require, the guidance doubles as leverage for negotiating that support into service agreements.

The IDR machinery gets some plumbing: federal agencies released nine new remittance advice remark codes so payers can tell providers exactly why a claim is not surprise-billing material—a state law limits the reimbursement, the claim is ineligible for IDR, the service is not covered. The codes supplement the existing claim adjustment reason codes and become mandatory January 1, 2027. Small as it sounds, clearer remittance coding aims at the front end of the dispute pipeline, where miscommunication feeds the arbitration volumes the agencies have been trying to tame all year.

Mayer Brown's read of the wellness program FAQs is organized around the five conditions an outcome based program must satisfy, from the annual qualification opportunity to the 30 percent reward cap that rises to 50 for tobacco programs. Two clarifications do the practical work. Completing a reasonable alternative mid-year earns the reward only prospectively—a June cessation course does not refund the January through May surcharges. And materials that merely note costs vary with participation do not trigger the full disclosure package, while anything describing the actual standards must include the alternatives and the physician accommodation statement.

Claims data confirming what benefits teams have suspected: in the group commercial population from 2022 through 2024, only about a quarter of women ages 40 to 64 carried a menopause diagnosis, and treatment often ran misaligned with documentation—therapy without a recorded diagnosis, diagnoses without corresponding care. Women with documented menopause showed higher rates of selected comorbid conditions, which is why the underdiagnosis matters for plan spend as much as for outcomes.

An argument that menopause is a benefits design problem, not an awareness problem: $1.8 billion a year in lost productivity, roughly 6,000 U.S. women reaching menopause daily, and a Mayo Clinic finding that 13 percent experienced an adverse work outcome from symptoms. With the FDA's removal of the warning that long discouraged hormone therapy now driving demand—and a shortage of estrogen patches—direct to consumer vendors are rushing into the gap, some initiating hormone therapy without a physical exam or mammogram. The prescription is integrated primary care built into the plan rather than point solutions, with Rhode Island's first-in-the-nation menopause accommodation mandate a sign of where this is heading.

The opener of a three-part KFF video essay series on where the premium dollar actually goes, and the answer is mostly upstream of the insurer. National health spending reached $5.3 trillion in 2024, and hospitals alone have driven 40 percent of the growth in recent years, and one or two health systems controlled inpatient care in nearly half of U.S. metro areas. Insurers largely pass those costs through, and consolidation plus employers' own demands for broad networks leave them little negotiating leverage.

Part two puts numbers on the insurer's share: overhead and profit run about $846 per enrollee per year in the employer market, $987 in the individual market, and $1,655 in Medicare Advantage—where roughly a dime of every premium dollar stays with the plan, against under two cents of administrative cost in traditional Medicare. Margins are thin in percentage terms, but the seven largest publicly traded insurers, PBM subsidiaries included, earned an estimated $71 billion in 2024. The question posed is not whether they profit but what value comes back.

The closer lands on the tradeoff sponsors live with daily: someone has to decide what gets covered and paid, and KFF's polling finds prior authorization is the single biggest burden insured adults report beyond cost itself, with nearly half saying care was denied or delayed within two years. On price, private insurers pay roughly double what Medicare pays for hospital care. Utilization management controls spending and blocks care clinicians call necessary; the series declines to pretend there is a clean answer.

Summary judgment for the employer, on facts every self funded sponsor should file away. BCI served as the plan's claims administrator and named ERISA claim fiduciary while also writing its stop-loss coverage—a conflict the court called actual once a newborn participant's second excess claim of roughly $1.4 million arrived near the coverage window's close. BCI's own account team had flagged the infant as a high cost claimant more than three months before the window shut, and its underwriting director conceded the company had retroactively modified stop-loss contracts before. The court held the duty of loyalty required expediting or covering the claim, refused to let undisclosed Blue Cross association manuals absolve a fiduciary under ERISA's anti exculpation clause, and awarded Scentsy an Amara surcharge for the amount it paid out of pocket.

Final approval closed four years of litigation over the proprietary Janus Funds in the company's own 401(k) and employee stock ownership plan. The certified class covers everyone invested in any Janus Fund from September 2016 through May 2026; notice reached 98.26 percent of the 2,189 member class and drew zero objections, with Fiduciary Counselors signing off as independent fiduciary. A companion order awarded exactly one third in fees—$2,166,666—plus $372,708.92 in expenses and $15,000 service awards to each of the three named plaintiffs.

Dismissed with prejudice, and a clean illustration of the meaningful benchmark standard doing its work. Participants in Ameritas' own $779 million 401(k) plan attacked the fees under the in-house group annuity contract, alleging the plan would have paid $10.56 million in 2021 if charges ran at half the contract's 2.5 percent and 0.5 percent caps. The court called that arithmetic purely speculative: the complaint pleaded contractual maximums, never actual fees, and its comparator, aggregate Brightscope/ICI industry averages, was the same benchmark the Eighth Circuit rejected in Barrett and Matousek because it says nothing about comparable services. The loyalty and monitoring claims fell as repackaged imprudence, and an informal request to amend, made in a brief rather than by motion, was denied.

The recordkeeping and managed-account fee case that nearly reached a jury: filed in 2020, certified in 2023, and settled on January 14, 2026, twenty-six days before trial. Early funding grew the common fund to $13,524,410.05 for roughly 136,000 participants, and only two class members objected. Beyond the money, the deal bars the plan's recordkeeper in writing from cross-selling to participants for three years and requires an RFP for investment and administrative consulting. A companion order awarded class counsel one third in fees, $4,507,685.87—notably a 0.62 multiplier on lodestar, meaning counsel took less than its hourly value—plus $400,962.86 in expenses and $20,000 apiece for the six named plaintiffs.

A litigation-side read of the August 11 en banc decision, sharpest on remedy and what happens next. The Fifth Circuit held the QPA methodology unlawful for counting ghost rates—contracted rates for services a provider never actually furnishes—and for excluding bonus and incentive payments from a benchmark the statute defines as the total maximum payment; the deflation was stark enough that providers were winning more than 80 percent of IDR arbitrations. Vacatur stood as the default APA remedy over the agencies' disruption objections, with enforcement discretion bridging the gap while QPAs are recalculated upward. Six judges dissented, and single-case air ambulance agreements stay out of the benchmark, the one issue the agencies won.