The monthly rate notice supplies the segment rates, yield-curve figures, and 30-year Treasury weighted averages that defined benefit plans use for funding and minimum-present-value calculations. Which table applies depends on the plan year and the elections in place, so administrators should pull the figure for their own plan rather than quote a headline rate.

Milliman and Marsh project that the 2027 employee deferral limit will rise to $25,500, with corresponding increases expected for catch-up limits and other inflation-adjusted thresholds, including a projected $37,250 total for workers aged 60 through 63, the $25,500 plus an $11,750 enhanced catch-up. Despite the headline, these are planning estimates, and nothing is official until the IRS announcement, which usually lands in late October or early November. Recordkeepers and payroll teams can pencil the numbers in; communications should wait for the agency.

The Ask the Experts column walks through which participant count governs a 403(b) plan’s Form 5500 filing status. For plan years beginning in 2023 and later, large-plan versus small-plan status for defined contribution plans generally turns on participants with account balances, while other questions on the form use different counts, so eligible employees without balances may drop out of one number and remain in another. The experts’ caution is to resist using the filing-status count for every participant line on the form.

Ary Rosenbaum recommends a standing yearly meeting devoted to how the retirement plan is actually operating, with an agenda spanning service providers, participant concerns, errors, cybersecurity, plan design, and who is responsible for what, memorialized in written minutes. ERISA does not require an annual meeting, and he does not claim otherwise. The minutes are the quiet payoff, since they preserve the reasons for decisions that get questioned years later.

The Mercer CFA Institute Global Pension Index compares the adequacy, sustainability, and integrity of 55 retirement systems and finds aging populations pressing on nearly all of them. The United States earns a C+ and ranks 33rd. The rankings and the reform recommendations belong to the index’s authors, and the methodology rewards particular design choices, so the grade is a conversation starter about coverage and sustainability rather than a verdict on any one plan.

Morgan Stanley’s survey of employers finds the 401(k) treated as a marquee benefit, with about a third of respondents calling it the single most important offering and retirement tying healthcare in top-five mentions. Employers also report leaning on plan design and education to compete for workers. These are employer perceptions rather than a ranking by employees, and the article supplies no sample size.

Panelists in this installment treat retirement income as a governance decision rather than a product purchase, distinguishing investments that can support optional income elections from products that lock participants into an annuity. Fees, access, portability, and participant understanding all enter the evaluation. The speakers are vendors and consultants with offerings in the space, and their framings carry that interest.

Employee Fiduciary compares ways employers can divide discretionary profit-sharing contributions among workers. A pro rata formula gives everyone the same percentage of pay; a new-comparability formula can allocate different percentages to employee groups, subject to applicable testing. The guide uses a small-employer example to compare costs and explains contribution limits, vesting and testing. Safe-harbor 401(k) status does not automatically exempt a separate profit-sharing allocation from nondiscrimination requirements.

Empower’s research describes savings scattered across prior-employer plans as workers change jobs, with roughly one-third of respondents reporting they may have lost track of a retirement account and 57% saying complexity has led them to delay action. The recommended fixes are practical, clearer information at job transitions and human help when participants ask for it. The figures are survey self-reports rather than verified counts of lost accounts, and the findings arrive as the industry builds out auto-portability infrastructure aimed at the same problem.

Ted Godbout reports the generational split in Empower’s survey data on lost retirement accounts, with 50% of Gen Z and 45% of Millennial respondents saying they may have lost track of savings from past employers, against 30% of Gen X and 14% of Baby Boomers. The survey covered 2,005 U.S. adults from July 30 to August 1, and 41% of respondents were not confident they could locate all their savings, while 84% have changed employers. These are self-reports, and the findings point to clearer job-transition information and human guidance rather than a blanket recommendation to consolidate every account.

In this opinion piece, Eric Dyson argues that plan committees should document their investment comparisons now rather than wait for the Supreme Court to define a meaningful benchmark in Anderson v. Intel, argued October 6. His distinction is between the benchmark a manager markets against and the comparison a fiduciary needs when deciding whether to keep an investment. The advice is one practitioner’s view, and Dyson urges committees to document why their comparisons fit the plan’s investments while the case is pending.

Gallagher’s research finds employers leaning on automatic enrollment, automatic escalation, and eligibility changes to close a readiness gap, with only 28% of employees saying their current strategy will meet their retirement goals. The employer data come from a 3,717-employer survey, while the employee readiness figure comes from separate polling, so the two numbers should not be chained together.

This interview with Basic Capital’s chief executive describes an optional brokerage-window investment that uses financing to give a participant more market exposure than the account balance alone would buy, with the participant paying the financing back over time and, in the company’s telling, no personal guarantee and no margin call. The interview presents the company’s account of the product rather than an independent assessment of its costs and risks. Plan fiduciaries should examine the financing terms and oversight obligations before treating access through a brokerage window as a reason to stop asking questions.

Proskauer reads the Labor Department’s parity red flags as a practical checklist, with the examples running to plan exclusions, medical-necessity review, and network practices that treat mental health or substance-use care more restrictively than medical care, plus the vendor-oversight questions a sponsor should be asking its administrator. The authors also read the guidance as a preview of rulemaking priorities. The document is guidance rather than a new final regulation, and the prediction about future outcome requirements is the authors’ inference.

Virgie Bright Ellington, a former insurer medical director now at bill-review vendor MBS Tech, maker of Medical Bill Shield, argues that employers should test whether paid claims and patient bills match the care actually delivered, asking about independent bill review, wrongly shifted patient liability, and comparisons against patient records. Her affiliation means the prescription matches her product, and the sweeping claims about what no plan checks are hers. The underlying audit questions remain reasonable ones to put to any administrator.

Medical billing codes that bundle maternity care into one payment will be replaced on January 1, 2027, by separate codes for prenatal care, labor management, delivery and postpartum care. The Foundation explains that Medicare was still considering whether to retain a bundled-payment option, with a final rule expected in November. Self-funded employers may see cost changes quickly because they pay claims directly, and a change designed to be cost-neutral nationally may still raise costs for an individual plan. Employers should ask insurers and administrators whether claims systems, contracts and reporting will be ready, then model their own maternity claims using the final rates.

Sarah Brenner walks through what Medicare enrollment changes for health savings accounts. New contributions end once Medicare coverage begins because Medicare is disqualifying other coverage, but existing balances stay available, nonmedical withdrawals after 65 escape the 20% penalty while remaining taxable, and Medicare premiums generally qualify as eligible expenses while Medigap premiums do not. Delayed Part A enrollment has retroactive-coverage consequences worth flagging in employee education for workers approaching 65.

Reported by EBN contributor Bruce Shutan, this piece gathers broker and carrier views on what ancillary lines now compete on, which is ease of enrollment, data integration, and service rather than premium alone. The quoted executives argue brokers should make service expectations explicit and measurable in carrier selection. The perspectives are industry participants’ own, and the shift they describe runs from price shopping to service-level accountability in dental, vision, and supplemental lines.

Healthcare Dive’s report adds reporting context to the Medicare Advantage and Part D proposed rule published in the October 20 Federal Register, including the enforcement history behind the directory-accuracy push and reaction from the PBM side. The proposal would hold enrollees to in-network cost sharing when inaccurate listings mislead them and would restrict Part D PBM compensation to flat service fees. It remains a proposal, with comments due December 15, and its direct reach is Medicare arrangements rather than commercial self-funded plans.

K&L Gates explains that California employers with five or more employees must extend bereavement leave to a designated person beginning January 1, 2027, with employees able to designate one person per 12-month period for the five-day leave. The roundup also covers revised restrictions on stay-or-pay agreements, the arrangements requiring workers to repay bonuses, training costs, or other amounts when they leave, with separate conditions and effective dates, plus AI, surveillance, and arbitration changes. Effective dates differ by statute, so compliance calendars should use each law’s own date rather than a single January 1 assumption.

Nelson Mullins explains California’s revised restrictions on agreements requiring workers to repay bonuses, training costs or other amounts when they leave. AB 1697, signed September 30, moves the restrictions to contracts entered into on or after January 1, 2027. It also expands exceptions for qualifying bonuses, government-funded recruitment and retention programs, advanced paid time off and certain financial-services affiliation payments. Each exception has conditions, so employers should review repayment terms in offer letters, bonus agreements and benefit policies before using them.

HR Dive examines whether leave provided as a disability accommodation must preserve an employee’s accrued paid time off, drawing on Kingsolver v. U.S. Attorney General, the Eleventh Circuit’s published August decision applying ADA standards under the Rehabilitation Act. The court held that flexible use of roughly 240 hours of accrued paid leave was itself a reasonable accommodation, that nothing about the employee’s disability required unpaid leave on top of it, and that an employee is entitled to a reasonable accommodation, not the accommodation of her choice. The practical checklist runs to written policies, past practice, and the interactive process. The holding is case-specific, not a universal rule that employers may always require PTO exhaustion.

Chief Judge Denise Casper dismissed the class action over BDO USA’s August 2023 employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) transaction, in which the ESOP bought 42% of the firm’s stock at roughly $100 per share for $1,242,025,992. Taylor argued that BDO’s 11.36% outside borrowing reduced participants’ share allocations. The court found that allocations instead depended on the ESOP’s separate loan, which carried a 3.96% rate. It also found that Taylor had not plausibly alleged overpayment or a valuation process compromised by misleading information. Without a plausibly alleged injury, he lacked standing to sue. The court agreed that an independent trustee “is not a whitewash,” distinguishing the cases Taylor relied on, and because this was the second failed complaint the dismissal is with prejudice. It is a standing ruling, not a merits endorsement of the valuation.

On October 19 the Supreme Court requested responses in three petitions asking when outdated actuarial assumptions in pension benefit calculations violate ERISA, Southern Co. v. Drummond from the Eleventh Circuit and the consolidated Sixth Circuit cases FedEx v. Watt and Bakery Workers Pension Committee v. Reichert. Each respondent had waived a response, and all three petitions were distributed for the November 6 conference before the requests issued, with responses now due November 18. The ERISA Industry Committee filed amicus briefs on the Sixth Circuit dockets on October 16, arguing per PLANSPONSOR’s report that the ruling below would expose thousands of defined benefit plans to litigation over competing actuarial opinions. A response request signals interest, not a grant, but three in one day on one question is worth watching.

Allied Painting & Decorating defeated the International Painters pension fund’s $427,195 withdrawal-liability assessment, with the Third Circuit holding in 2024 that the statute’s notice requirement is independent and the fund’s roughly 12-year delay sank its claim. Victory bought no fees. Judge Robert Kirsch adopted the magistrate judge’s April opinion denying Allied’s fee application, applying the circuit’s employer-specific standard that the fund’s position must have been frivolous, unreasonable, or without foundation, which a position resting on then-open legal questions was not. Conn Maciel Carey’s commentary frames the lesson for employers, which is that prevailing in a withdrawal-liability fight often still means paying your own lawyers. The demanding standard is specific to this setting, not every ERISA fee application.

Thomas Hannon sued Guardian after it reduced and then ended his disability payments. Guardian argues that federal benefits law displaces his state-law claims, a question the court has not yet decided. Judge Leo Sorokin refused to exclude Guardian’s witness statement or let Hannon question the witness after the evidence-gathering deadline, because Hannon had sought no evidence during the period set aside for that dispute. Guardian’s witness disclosure was deficient, but the court found that Hannon had enough notice of the witness and her role. Guardian must produce any documents supporting her statement that it has not already produced by October 23. Hannon’s response is due November 6, and Guardian’s reply is due November 13. Roberts Disability Law has a write-up of the ruling.

Littler’s analysis of Bolton v. Inland Fresh Seafood emphasizes what the en banc Eleventh Circuit’s overruling of its exhaustion precedent removes, a procedural defense to statutory claims such as fiduciary-breach suits, while benefit-denial claims still go through the plan’s claims process. The firm keeps the open question open, since the court did not decide whether an express plan provision requiring exhaustion of statutory claims would hold.

Healthfirst, the large New York Medicare Advantage insurer, filed an Administrative Procedure Act challenge to five measures CMS used in scoring its 2027 star rating, asking the court to order a recalculation from 3.5 to at least 4 stars. Healthfirst alleges that the disputed rating will cost it more than $380 million in 2028 payments, and it attacks the agency’s handling of specific measures as arbitrary. These are allegations plus the insurer’s own math. The broader signal is that star-rating methodology fights are moving into the courts.

Stephanie Gonzales, a union organizer and service member, sued the Service Employees International Union and its Pennsylvania healthcare affiliate, alleging she was fired over her military service and leave in violation of the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act (USERRA) and the Pennsylvania Military Affairs Act. The complaint’s interest for employers is the reminder that USERRA’s reemployment and nondiscrimination duties reach every employer, unions included, and interact with leave and benefits administration. These are untested allegations in a complaint filed October 20.

Cooley reviews the SEC staff’s October 15 interpretations on Form S-8, the registration statement for employee equity plans, covering awards granted before an initial public offering or in an acquisition, registration timing for restricted awards, fee treatment of forfeited awards, and share counting, with practice-oriented detail on when issuers can rely on the new positions. Staff interpretations are not rules, and the firm is careful to say so.

Cyber insurers at the NetDiligence summit say most losses still come from familiar ransomware and human error rather than exotic AI attacks, which keeps the basics decisive, multifactor authentication, network segmentation, employee training, and monitoring that someone actually watches. For benefits teams the relevance is direct, since plan data and vendor connections are exactly the kind of target these controls protect, and carriers increasingly price coverage on their presence.