The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, which insures private-sector pensions, published a new set of frequently asked questions on coverage determinations, the process for getting an official answer on whether a plan falls under PBGC insurance at all. Sponsors or their actuaries, accountants, attorneys and third-party administrators can ask at any time, and the FAQs list exactly what to send in. Plans claiming an exemption need to provide more detail. A plan said to cover only a substantial owner must document ownership percentages going back 60 months, stock options and family relationships. A small professional service employer must show it has never had more than 25 active participants since 1974 and describe the owners’ professions and education. Church plans and Puerto Rico based plans get their own checklists. PBGC says incomplete submissions and slow responses are the main causes of delay, and an unfavorable answer can be appealed to its Appeals Board.

Representatives Bobby Scott and Mark DeSaulnier, the ranking Democrats on the House Education and Workforce Committee and its pensions subcommittee, sent an October 8 letter to Assistant Secretary Daniel Aronowitz questioning whether the Employee Benefits Security Administration, the Labor Department agency that enforces ERISA, can still police benefit plans covering 155 million Americans after a wave of departures. The sharpest number they cite comes from a January 2026 inspector general report. EBSA is down to roughly one investigator for every 21,400 plans it oversees, from one per 13,900 two years earlier. The lawmakers asked for detailed workforce data by October 22. Josh Oppenheimer of the American Retirement Association reads the letter as a preview of oversight hearings and subpoenas if Democrats retake the House.

December 31, 2026 is an important retirement plan amendment deadline, but it isn’t the deadline for every change. Segal explains which amendments are due this year, which follow the IRS’s separate timetable for individually designed plans, and which qualify for later deadlines. The year-end date applies to non-governmental single-employer plans, including 403(b) plans not maintained by public schools, while collectively bargained plans have until the end of 2028 and governmental plans until the end of 2029. The date matters most for the long list of discretionary features that trigger amendments only if a plan has adopted them, such as in-service distributions at 59½, emergency savings accounts, Roth treatment of employer contributions, the $7,000 cash-out limit, student loan matching and hardship self-certification. Extra time to amend the paperwork didn’t give plans extra time to follow the law. The amendments must reflect when each provision actually took effect for the plan.

Retirement Learning Center’s Case of the Week takes a question from a financial advisor and explains a trap in plan terminations. Terminating a 401(k) normally lets participants take their money, but not if the employer keeps or creates another plan. If any alternative defined contribution plan exists from the termination date through 12 months after the last dollar is paid out, the termination is not a valid reason to distribute employees’ salary contributions and certain other protected contributions. The restriction is about using termination as a distribution event, not a flat ban on replacing a plan. Some replacements don’t count, including an ESOP, a SEP, a SIMPLE IRA, a 403(b) and a 457(b) plan, and there is a narrow exception for a new plan that covers almost entirely different employees. The piece walks through a sponsor that wants to terminate in October, pay out by December and start fresh in January, which fails, and suggests a merger or transfer instead.

Ian Berger explains how automatically opened Trump Accounts work and when families can start adding money. Only about seven million Trump Accounts had been opened by parents as of July, so Treasury automatically created an account for roughly 60 million more eligible children. The auto accounts live together in a master group trust and can hold only two things, the $1,000 federal contribution, which parents still must claim, and contributions from tax-exempt organizations. Before a family can add its own money or accept employer contributions, a parent must claim the account and move it out of the trust. The second announcement lets private foundations contribute publicly traded stock instead of cash, with no dollar cap and no effect on the $5,000 annual limit that applies to individual and employer contributions, though contributions must go to a targeted group of children and stock generally must be held five years before sale.

Cerulli’s new defined contribution research finds that putting a retirement income product on the menu doesn’t mean participants will use it or understand it. Participants want several things that can be difficult to deliver in a single product. 46 percent of participants want to withdraw money any time, 39 percent want a guaranteed monthly check that outlasts their savings, 40 percent want a detailed personal plan to follow and 31 percent want to keep changing investments. Cerulli’s conclusion is that no single product satisfies that mix, so sponsors may need two or three income options per menu, recordkeepers need infrastructure that actually supports them, and most pre-retirees won’t make these decisions without an advisor. 70 percent of recordkeepers told Cerulli that improving retiree distribution support is now an organizational priority.

Vanguard’s small-business supplement to How America Saves covers 21,000 plans with up to $50 million in assets, averaging 49 participants each, and the headline depends on which participation measure you pick. Averaged plan by plan, 73 percent of eligible employees participate. Counted across all eligible employees, only six in ten do, against 83 percent at large plans. The driver is design. Only 26 percent of small plans use automatic enrollment, against 61 percent of large plans, and auto-enrolled plans see 79 percent participation where voluntary plans see 51 percent. Once enrolled, small plan workers save like everyone else, contributing 7.5 percent of pay on average and 11 percent with employer money included, nearly identical to large plans. The report’s message for small employers is that these plans work once people are in them, and getting people in is the unfinished part.

Corporate pension surpluses grew again in September, and this time rates did the work. A jump of nearly half a percentage point in corporate bond rates pushed discount rates to their highest level since May 2009, helped by the Federal Reserve’s September 16 rate increase, its first in more than three years, and the drop in liabilities more than offset one of the year’s worst market months. PLANSPONSOR’s roundup shows the consulting firms’ estimates clustering tightly. Marsh McLennan puts S&P 1500 plans at 113 percent funded, Wilshire at 113.6 percent, Legal & General at 112.3 percent and Aon at 109.8 percent, with Milliman’s index of the 100 largest corporate plans at 114.5 percent. The practical point for sponsors is the one October Three makes. Rate-driven gains lift every plan, including poorly funded ones, where equity rallies mostly help plans that are already healthy.

Alight’s 401(k) index recorded just four above-normal trading days in the entire third quarter, against ten in the second, with 0.18 percent of assets changing funds. Even the Federal Reserve’s September 16 rate increase didn’t produce an above-normal trading day. The only busy day of the month came the day before the announcement, and the ten days after it never reached above-normal volume. What trading occurred leaned steadily toward safety. Fixed-income funds drew net inflows on 81 percent of September’s trading days, up from 50 percent in July, with money going to stable value, money market and bond funds while large-cap equity and target-date funds had net outflows. Alight’s read is that automatic enrollment and target-date defaults have simply removed most participants from day-to-day investing, and that the drift toward fixed income looks like modest rebalancing rather than flight from stocks.

Venable’s Lisa Tavares and Carissa Davis map a patchwork of menopause laws that now reaches both HR policies and health plans. Rhode Island already requires reasonable accommodations and written notice to employees. The Illinois Menopause Equity and Care Act takes effect January 1, 2027 and adds an insurance mandate for hormonal and non-hormonal therapy starting in 2028. Philadelphia’s accommodation ordinance also starts in 2027. On the coverage side, Maryland, Louisiana and New Jersey have enacted mandates, and Louisiana’s bars prior authorization and step therapy on hormone replacement prescriptions. The key distinction for sponsors is funding. State insurance mandates generally apply to insured coverage, while self-funded ERISA plans generally aren’t subject to those mandates. Employers still need to consider workplace accommodation requirements no matter how they fund their health benefits. The authors note New York has four bills pending and that California and Virginia governors vetoed coverage mandates this fall.

A September Milliman study of group commercial claims from 2022 through 2024 puts data behind a question employers increasingly ask about midlife women’s health benefits. About 1.3 million American women enter menopause each year, yet the study found only about 25 percent of commercially insured women ages 40 to 64 carry a menopause diagnosis, which the authors read as underdiagnosis. Treatment doesn’t line up with diagnosis either, since some women receive hormone therapy with no menopause diagnosis on file while diagnosed women often go untreated, and women with a diagnosis show higher rates of other conditions. Before buying specialized menopause benefits, employers should look at what their claims data says about the care employees receive. But a missing diagnosis code doesn’t prove that care was denied.

Fall is benefits shopping season, and Warner Norcross’s Brandon Cross and Stephanie Grant warn employers about a pitch that keeps coming around. Wellness indemnity programs promise a free benefit in which employees pay premiums pretax, collect fixed cash payments for completing wellness activities or getting preventive care, and everyone saves on employment taxes. The IRS has repeatedly said the math fails. When premiums are paid pretax, cash wellness payments that don’t reimburse qualifying, unreimbursed medical expenses can be taxable wages subject to FICA, FUTA and withholding. Paying the premiums entirely after tax can change the result. The problem is the specific combination being sold, pretax funding plus supposedly tax-free cash regardless of expenses, which can leave employers and employees with an unpaid tax bill.

Suzanne Whitlock bought a voluntary supplemental disability policy offered through her employer, insurance brokerage Lockton Companies, paid the premiums herself and kept the coverage after she left. When the insurer denied her anxiety and depression claim, she sued for benefits under ERISA and asserted alternative state law claims. Judge Andrew Schopler held ERISA governs the policy because Lockton negotiated a 30 percent discount, marketed the benefit as carefully selected, collected and remitted premiums, reported the plan on its Form 5500 and, decisively for the safe harbor analysis, received commissions and fees on the program. With the state law claims displaced, the court conducted a trial based on the written record and entered judgment for the insurer. Whitlock showed that her earnings had fallen, but didn’t prove that her condition prevented her from performing all her usual duties or working the hours her occupation normally required, and the court noted both psychiatrists tied her symptoms to situational stress while she was building her own company on 32 to 40 hours a week.

The tobacco surcharge wave reached Mondelez, the snack maker behind Oreo and Ritz, in a complaint former employee Carrie Rusbuldt filed October 9 in Chicago through Siri & Glimstad. Mondelez’s enrollment guides told employees that tobacco users of any kind, e-cigarettes included and no matter how frequent the use, pay an extra $100 a month for medical coverage, and her pay stub shows a Ben Sur Tobacco deduction. The complaint alleges the guides never disclosed the rights that make a surcharge lawful, a reasonable alternative or waiver available to everyone, accommodation of a personal physician’s recommendations, and a path to the full reward for employees who complete the free cessation program. It also presses a self-dealing theory. Because the plan is self-funded, every surcharge dollar allegedly reduced what Mondelez itself had to contribute, so the suit adds fiduciary breach and prohibited transaction counts over the company profiting from plan assets. The complaint argues that employees who complete the cessation program should get back surcharges already paid that year. That conflicts with the agencies’ August FAQs, which rejected that interpretation of the 2013 rules. These are allegations no court has weighed.

A week after the Anderson v. Intel argument, Quarles’s appellate and benefits teams predict the Court will affirm the Ninth Circuit and require a meaningful comparison investment in suits over fund performance, with the real question being how much guidance the opinion gives. The lawyers highlight two exchanges from the argument. Justice Kavanaugh observed that half of all funds will always sit below the median. Justice Barrett pressed whether calling an apple an apple requires criteria, suggesting even the plaintiffs had conceded the principle and were only fighting about its content. And the Labor Department’s pending fiduciary proposal already defines a meaningful benchmark for funds holding alternative assets, so sponsors may face the question no matter how the case ends. The firm’s advice is to document the objectives behind each investment selection now.

Ballard Spahr’s Edward Rogers and Brian Pinheiro expect the Court to require meaningful investment comparisons, but offer two cautions for sponsors. First, a win for Intel may change less than headlines suggest, since every circuit except the Sixth already requires some form of meaningful benchmark, and the Court may adopt a less demanding version than some circuits apply, with the Solicitor General urging a test requiring only that a comparator share the challenged fund’s goals. Second, the flow of underperformance suits hasn’t slowed since the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, and most lower courts have kept dismissing complaints for failing to plead benchmarks, as though expecting the Court to uphold that requirement. The authors flag the moment plaintiffs’ counsel conceded that performance allegations require some inherent comparison, which several justices treated as giving up the core of the appeal.

Cooley’s Alessandra Murata offers a practical guide to refresh grants, the additional equity awards companies give existing employees once their new-hire grants vest and the retention pull fades. Some companies make grants every year alongside performance reviews, keeping vesting schedules overlapping so employees always hold unvested equity. Others make larger grants every two or three years as initial awards finish vesting. Most skip the year-long wait before any shares vest that commonly applies to new hires. Options remain common at earlier-stage companies while restricted stock units dominate above roughly $1 billion in valuation. Sizing is the hard problem, typically solved with a percentage of the original grant, level-based guidelines or a target for total unvested value. The piece closes with the compliance basics, share reserve limits, securities law and the tax treatment that follows each equity type.