BENEFITS DIGEST

Christopher Carosa asks benefits lawyers Marcia Wagner and Michelle Capezza how an employer would actually offer Trump Account contributions, and the answers separate adopting the benefit from running it. Under the proposed rules, salary-reduction contributions would be available only for employees’ dependents through a separate program the tax code creates. Employers would need to build payroll and trustee coordination, let elections change prospectively at least monthly, and run nondiscrimination testing that examines both who qualifies and whether benefits disproportionately favor higher-paid employees. The $2,500 annual exclusion is a combined limit per employee, not per dependent. The article examines proposed administrative rules, whose details could change before they are finalized.

Snell & Wilmer walks through what the October 22 update to the IRS retirement-plan correction program changes in practice. Self-correction now reaches more mistakes, generally available until the later of the end of the third plan year after the failure or 18 months after the plan identifies it, with exceptions. Some errors remain eligible for self-correction during an audit, including where the employer demonstrated a specific commitment to correct them before the examination began. The firm also covers the new conditions for correcting overpayments and automatic-enrollment failures. Written correction procedures remain the sponsor’s job, because the expanded program rewards plans that can show how they catch and fix their own errors.

Angela Stockbridge gets specific about the new correction program, which replaced its predecessor immediately on October 22. Her walkthrough covers the conditions for fixing eligible inadvertent failures, the correction window running to the later of the third plan-year end or 18 months after identification, and the need to document discovery and correction before an IRS examination begins. Employer-eligibility failures require stopping contributions within six months, overpayment relief carries exceptions including a $250 threshold and rollover notices, and she describes a 12-month window that applies to certain matching-contribution corrections. The separate IRA correction program opens May 1, 2027, and the earnings-floor idea tied to the Labor Department’s online calculator remains a proposal, not a current rule.

PLANSPONSOR’s Valentina Baez adds the employer-practice angle to the correction-program update, with practitioners describing how documentation and participant interviews establish when a failure was actually identified, the fact that starts the correction clock. The piece treats the updated program as effective immediately, notes the IRA correction program arrives May 1, 2027 as an application-based system, and records the January 20 comment deadline on the IRA piece. Sponsors keep their existing self-correction options, because the application program is an addition, not a replacement.

NAPA details the IRA side of the October 22 correction guidance. The new IRA program opens May 1, 2027 with corrections limited at launch to four categories. Three cover service-provider errors, a missed required minimum distribution, the wrong type of account opened, and a distribution or transfer that mishandles an inherited IRA for a nonspouse beneficiary. The fourth covers a 60-day rollover that missed its window where denying a waiver would offend equity or good conscience, including events beyond the individual’s reasonable control. Applications are filed through Pay.gov with a $3,500 fee for single filings before 2028. Rollover-deadline waivers transition out of individual IRS ruling requests, with both routes open during 2027, while the free automatic-waiver and self-certification routes stay available. Self-correction isn’t part of the IRA program at launch, and comments on both revenue procedures are due January 20, 2027.

Ary Rosenbaum opens with the Terminator and lands on a practical point. He expects artificial intelligence to compress fees and margins in plan administration, which would let providers who use it well do more for less while the ones who don’t lose business to the ones who do. He wants human review of anything the tools produce, controls on what client data goes into them, and attention to the conflicts that come with the efficiency.

Emily Boyle’s installment in the Roadmap series sorts retirement-income options into three categories and explains what makes guaranteed products different, including their dependence on the insurer standing behind them, partial annuitization, fees and credit ratings. A survey of 2,000 pre-retirees found 22% have access to a retirement-income product in their plan and 29% don’t know whether their plan offers one, while 59% of those with access invest in one, a share of the smaller access group rather than of everyone surveyed. The piece frames the sponsor’s work as education and provider selection, not a mandate to add anything.

Michael Doshier, who leads retirement at LPL, argues that state auto-IRA mandates give advisers a natural opening to discuss employer-sponsored plans, and he points to a Maryland assisted-living company that chose its own plan over the state program. The Boston College research he cites suggests a relationship between state mandates and private plan formation, which is not the same as proof that one causes the other. Federal startup tax credits and the coming Saver’s Match round out the pitch. No state requires an employer to adopt a 401(k).

Fred Barstein forecasts where defined contribution plans go next, drawing on what plan sponsors say at the training sessions his organization runs. The priorities are nuts and bolts, administration that works, data that moves cleanly between providers, and collaboration among advisers, recordkeepers and payroll, with the conflicts that collaboration creates getting a hard look. The changes he describes are forecasts, and their pace depends on employers actually demanding them.

Joshua Dietch draws on a study of nearly 600 advisers to describe how recordkeepers actually get hired and fired. Price drives selection for 80% and service for 68%, but the walk-away numbers reverse the story, with 28% citing service failures as the reason they stop doing business with a provider against 8% citing fees. Needs differ across specialist, hybrid and wealth-focused practices, so the useful comparison for a plan committee is against advisers serving plans like theirs.

Sherry Porter of Bricker Graydon Wyatt reads the new employee stock ownership plan law as the start of a friendlier era, anchored by its recognition of good-faith reliance on an independent appraisal. The friendlier-enforcement framing is her assessment, and the law grants no immunity and repeals no fiduciary duty, so trustees still answer for how they evaluate the valuations they receive.

Lockton’s take on the employee stock ownership plan valuation law lands on what it doesn’t fix. A statutory framework for relying on a qualifying appraisal doesn’t end valuation litigation, because independence, assumptions and conflicts of interest are still where the cases get fought. The authors also separate the insurance consequences, with directors-and-officers and fiduciary coverage responding to different claims, and caution against expecting premiums to move right away. For selling owners and trustees, the message is that the law changes the framework, not the diligence.

When a life-sciences company sells, what happens to management’s bonuses, options, restricted stock, profits interests and phantom equity turns on what the governing documents say, and Haynes Boone’s checklist walks through each award type. Before a sale process starts, the useful review covers each award’s vesting triggers, change-in-control provisions and tax treatment, because the documents, not the deal announcement, control what management actually receives. The guidance is aimed at retaining executives through a transaction.

Correcting a plan error and deciding who pays for it are two different problems. Ary Rosenbaum advises sponsors to preserve payroll records, implementation instructions and service agreements. A fiduciary-service label doesn’t tell you which tasks a provider actually took on, so the service agreement is what settles who owed what. The piece is a practical reminder that the recordkeeping fight after an error often matters as much as the fix.

Employer interest in contributing to Trump Accounts keeps running into administration. PLANSPONSOR reports hearing participants and consultants describing multiple trustees, payroll mechanics and account authentication as the obstacles between a willing employer and an actual contribution. Automatic account opening doesn’t replace the parent’s claiming process, so an employer can’t assume every employee’s child has a usable account. The picture is operational choices and uncertainty, not a settled model.

Russell McNorton’s question is about responsibility, not the number. His Form 5500 analysis places $977 in per-participant administrative cost at the 90th percentile for smaller plans, a benchmark rather than damages in any lawsuit. He argues the bigger fiduciary risk is failing to assign who monitors costs and documents the review, since committee meetings alone don’t establish oversight. McNorton works for an administration-services provider, and a fee level by itself doesn’t prove a breach.

Morgan Stanley surveyed 200 decisionmakers at plans holding at least $50 million and found retirement plans ranked alongside health coverage in perceived employee value. Sponsors in the survey increasingly prioritize participant understanding and look to advisers for education help. A separate Voya survey associates education use with stronger financial behaviors, an association rather than proof of cause. The rankings reflect what sponsors believe employees value, which is not the same as asking the employees.

Elon Musk pledged a SpaceX share for each American child, and the article explores whether Trump Accounts could hold them. Aon commentary highlights the family, tax and trustee complications an employer would face before anything like that could be administered. It’s a pledge, not a delivery, and nothing establishes that individual SpaceX shares are permissible Trump Account investments under the statute’s limits. For employers, the gap between a headline gift and a working mechanism is the story.

Separate regular and Roth catch-up elections can misclassify contributions when a participant stops saving midyear. TruePlan’s 26-payroll example shows a saver who quits contributing after 18 pay periods with dollars already labeled catch-up even though total contributions never reached the regular limit. Those dollars aren’t catch-up contributions in the example, and the employee may have made more Roth contributions than intended. A single election whose tax treatment changes only after the regular limit is reached avoids the problem, because nothing gets labeled catch-up until the participant is actually past the cap.

An employer contribution to a child’s Trump Account could involve considerably more work than adding a payroll deduction. At an IRS hearing, Aon’s Grace Lattyak warned that employers might have to validate accounts, transmit contributions and handle corrections separately with numerous financial institutions. PLANADVISER also reports questions about payroll taxes and whether existing payroll systems can accommodate the benefit. For employers considering it, the unresolved issue is how the administration would work across account providers, not simply whether employees would welcome another contribution.

What happens when a Trump Account’s investments drift outside the permitted limits? Retirement-industry commenters want a correction process and protection for trustees relying in good faith on public investment information. Other requests go further. Vanguard sought room for bonds and Coinbase for cryptocurrency, although the statute restricts the eligible investments. The October 20 comment deadline has passed. For providers building these accounts, the distinction matters between changes Treasury could make through guidance and changes that would require Congress.

Confidence and financial pressure coexist in MFS’s survey of 1,000 retirement-plan participants. While 41% believe they can retire when they want, six in ten expect to work longer and three quarters plan to save more. Confidence was 47% among men, 33% among women and 32% among Gen X participants. Those differences give sponsors and advisers a reason to look beyond a single workforce-wide confidence score when planning education. The survey captures expectations, not a calculation of whether participants have saved enough.

Moving a former employee’s small balance out of a retirement plan doesn’t ensure it will keep growing. PensionBee reports that 68% of automatic-rollover IRA holders lost value in the first year and 39% remained below their starting balance after eight years. Its $43 billion figure is a projection for 2030, not the amount currently held. PensionBee sells account consolidation, so its research comes with a commercial interest. The findings nevertheless put a concrete question before sponsors choosing a rollover provider. What happens to the balance after the transfer?

Medication costs can show up in retirement savings. Among GLP-1 users surveyed by Nationwide, 14% reported withdrawing retirement money, 14% reported reducing contributions and 17% reported taking on new debt. 51% worried about trading retirement security for the medication, even as 88% remained optimistic about its health benefits. These self-reported findings don’t establish that the drugs caused the financial changes. They do give health and retirement teams a shared issue to examine when assessing employees’ out-of-pocket costs.

A more generous maximum match can still fail the rules for an automatic-enrollment safe-harbor plan. NAPA’s example tests the formula at every employee contribution level, not just at the top. An enhanced formula must provide at least the basic match of 100% on the first 1% of pay and 50% on the next 5%. Its matching rate cannot increase as employees contribute more, and highly compensated employees cannot get a higher matching rate than other employees. Sponsors changing the formula need to check the full schedule before relying on the safe harbor.

Social Security benefits will rise 3.6% for 2027, about $75 a month on average. For employees approaching retirement, that announcement offers a useful opening to discuss how Social Security fits alongside workplace savings. PLANSPONSOR encourages general education without turning employer communications into individualized advice. A percentage increase is easier to use when employees understand what it changes in their retirement income and what it doesn’t resolve about their longer-term savings needs.

A pension plan paying out more than it takes in may have to sell investments during a downturn just to keep benefits flowing. Segal argues that relatively high interest rates make this a useful time to evaluate ways to reduce that risk. One approach builds a bond portfolio around upcoming payments so growth investments needn’t be sold at a bad time. Other options match investments to longer-term liabilities or transfer obligations to an insurer. The choice starts with the plan’s funding goals and cash needs, coordinated between its actuary and investment adviser.

An independent appraisal doesn’t relieve an employee stock ownership plan’s fiduciaries of their own judgment. Bradley emphasizes that limitation in the Retire Through Ownership Act, which gives statutory recognition to good-faith reliance on qualifying appraisals while preserving prudence and loyalty duties and Labor’s rulemaking authority. For trustees and transaction advisers, the question remains whether the valuation deserves that reliance. The firm is cautious about treating the new language as broad protection from litigation.

Seyfarth sees meaningful protection for closely held employer-stock transactions in the Retire Through Ownership Act’s appraisal-reliance language. Its analysis focuses on what the new statutory treatment of adequate consideration could mean for employee stock ownership plans buying shares that have no public market price. Fiduciary duties remain, so a qualifying appraisal is not a substitute for a prudent process.

Preparing for a retirement-plan committee meeting can mean searching documents and reconciling information from several providers. The AI tools described in this feature aim to automate parts of that work, including document queries, meeting preparation and fiduciary reporting; other tools focus on participant engagement. These are vendor descriptions, not independent findings that the products improve outcomes. Before adopting them, sponsors need to establish what data the tool can access, who checks its output and who remains responsible for the resulting decisions.

Marsh projects a $25,500 employee contribution limit for 401(k), 403(b), and eligible 457 plans in 2027. It estimates an $8,500 catch-up limit for most eligible workers ages 50 and older and $11,750 for those ages 60 through 63. The estimates incorporate September’s inflation reading and remain provisional until the IRS announces the official limits, which usually arrive in late October or early November.

The US portion of State Street’s retirement survey, covering 4,040 adults ages 45 and older, finds only 24% of pre-retirees reporting high confidence in fully retiring, and 21% feeling optimistic about their financial preparedness. The findings point toward practical transition and income-planning help at the moment of retirement rather than product pitches. The pre-retiree and retiree samples answer different questions, so their figures describe different groups.

Decumulation, the spend-down phase after retirement, is where target-date competition has moved, and sponsors field the how-much-can-I-withdraw question whether or not their lineup has an answer. Capital Group’s new withdrawal guidelines are one vendor’s answer, a fixed approach starting around 4% to 4.5% of the initial balance and adjusting for inflation, and a variable approach taking around 5% to 5.5% of the prior year-end balance. The guidance comes from the firm’s modeling of 100,000 market paths over 30 years, and modeled sustainability is not a promise. The firm is also adding retirement-income wording to the names of its 2010 through 2025 in-retirement funds, not the entire target-date series.

NAPA reports a practitioner panel with Jordan Cross, Amanda Iverson, and Joey Santos Jones. The panelists describe artificial intelligence already at work in preparing employee data for plan administration, drafting participant communications, and building training materials, and they map where human judgment still has to do the work. Their cautions are confidentiality, unreliable answers, and the slow loss of the skills needed to check a tool’s output, so they recommend written policies and human review. It is practitioner conversation rather than regulatory guidance, and delegation to a tool does not delegate the fiduciary duty.

Mercer’s 15-page explainer covers the employer side of the new child savings accounts, to which employers have been able to contribute since July 2026. The $2,500 exclusion applies per employee, not per child. Additional employer contributions outside the program are taxable wages, and individual and employer contributions remain subject to the account’s separate aggregate annual limit, while Social Security, Medicare, and federal unemployment taxes still apply under the proposed guidance. Minor employees cannot fund their own accounts pretax, and the linked proposed regulations carry their own open questions.

Foley & Lardner’s explainer covers the employer-contribution side of the new accounts, up to $2,500 per employee per year, fundable by employer dollars or pre-tax salary reductions for dependents through a cafeteria plan. An employer offering contributions needs a separate written program plus nondiscrimination, notification, reporting, and trustee-notice compliance, and salary-reduction designs require plan amendments. Parts of the framework rest on proposed regulations, so not every mechanic is final.

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.

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.

Seyfarth’s benefits blog reads the Retire Through Ownership Act as a long-sought answer to the valuation uncertainty that has dogged employee stock ownership plan transactions, with fiduciaries now expressly permitted to rely in good faith on an independent appraisal that follows the valuation principles of Revenue Ruling 59-60. The authors argue the change should reduce litigation pressure on good-faith reliance. The statute itself preserves ERISA’s fiduciary duties and the Labor Department’s rulemaking authority, so the reliance the firm describes still sits inside the duty of prudence rather than outside it.

Bradley’s B. David Joffe examines what the new valuation statute for employee stock ownership plans changes in practice for transaction committees. Good-faith reliance on an independent appraisal now has an express statutory footing, but independence, engagement process, and the handling of disputed valuation questions remain the ground where claims are won and lost, and the Labor Department keeps its authority to regulate. The piece treats the act as a process framework rather than immunity, which matches the statute’s own preservation of fiduciary duties.

Phelps Dunbar adds a transactional perspective on the new law for employee stock ownership plans, framing good-faith appraisal reliance as a process improvement for fiduciaries who still must understand the appraiser’s assumptions and exercise oversight. The firm is explicit that the statute is not immunity from imprudence claims. The firm’s advice is to treat the appraisal as a document to interrogate rather than a document to file.

Kaufman & Canoles’ fall update covers employee stock ownership plan valuations, retirement-plan amendments, written cafeteria-plan terms, educational assistance, and Trump accounts. The firm urges employers to check that their written cafeteria-plan documents match how payroll handles pretax premiums and that educational-assistance documents can accommodate inflation adjustments rather than hard-coding the existing $5,250 limit. It also advises documenting an independent appraisal process when relying on the new ESOP valuation law.

Retirement Learning Center walks through curing a failed ADP test, the test comparing higher-paid employees’ salary deferrals with everyone else’s, by amending the plan into a nonelective safe harbor, an employer contribution paid regardless of whether employees defer anything themselves. Per the article, a calendar-year plan can adopt the 3% version for 2026 by November 30, 2026, while the 4% version remains available into the following year and still covers all of 2026. Eligibility conditions and vesting still matter, other testing requirements may still apply, and sponsors staring at a failed test should price the fix against refunds rather than treat it as an escape hatch.

Fred Reish continues his series on the Labor Department’s proposed framework for alternative assets in defined contribution plans, reaching the liquidity factor. His point is structural. Participants can trade daily while many alternative vehicles cannot, so a fiduciary has to investigate how a fund bridges that mismatch, and reliance on managers or other fiduciaries must be informed reliance that does not look past contrary information or conflicts. The framework is a proposal, not final law, and the critique is the author’s.

Leaders of the American Retirement Association and ASPPA told their annual meeting they expect the next Congress to take a serious run at broad retirement-coverage legislation, describing bipartisan interest alongside concern that any mandate preserve the plans employers already sponsor. The predictions are tied to election outcomes nobody knows yet, so this is a forecast from advocates with a stake, useful mainly as a signal of where the trade groups will spend their lobbying effort.

An ASPPA Annual panel turned Cycle 4 plan restatements into a project plan. Identify which plans need restating, chase down missing or unsigned prior documents, decide up front whether clients may request design changes during the cycle, and run one status-tracking system with clear internal ownership. The panel’s sharpest advice is to carry current provisions forward accurately and put experienced document reviewers on the output, because restatement software and AI drafting do not replace human review. Batching the work beats a year-end scramble.

This commentary argues that state auto-IRA mandates are expanding the private small-plan market rather than displacing it, as employers nudged into action by a mandate graduate into their own 401(k) plans. It sketches the opportunity for advisers, TPAs, pooled plans, and plan technology, and forecasts more of the same as additional states come online. The forecasts and the mandate-causation claim are the author’s projections rather than measured results.

Advisers quoted here treat the Social Security cost-of-living announcement as an opening for retirement-income conversations rather than news that changes anyone’s plan. Fidelity models what a hypothetical future benefit reduction would mean for savings targets, and CAPTRUST connects the moment to participant education. The hypothetical is only a hypothetical, since no benefit cut is enacted or scheduled, and sponsors fielding participant questions can use the same distinction.

Ary Rosenbaum’s reminder is simple and regularly ignored. The handbook is not the plan, so eligibility, matching, and benefit descriptions in employee-facing materials have to track the operative plan document and its amendments, because conflicting summaries breed administration mistakes and disputes.

Mayer Brown summarizes SEC staff interpretations issued October 15 on Form S-8, the registration statement for employee equity plans, covering fee calculations, awards granted before an initial public offering, acquisition-related awards, former employees, and reuse of unused restricted stock unit registration capacity. One useful nuance is that employer contributions and employee-directed purchases can take different fee treatment. A separate interpretation starts the two-business-day clock for Form 4, the insider transaction report, on the transaction’s local date, which matters for cross-border grants.

Pillsbury explains why UK stock options do not simply carry over when a company reorganizes by placing a new Delaware parent above its UK business. Assumption and exchange are different events, and preserving an option’s economics is not the same as preserving its tax treatment. An option that ends up priced below fair market value after the change can create U.S. deferred-compensation tax problems for employees who relocate to the United States. Board approval and completed grant conditions matter because awards cannot be backdated, and grants above $10 million in a twelve-month period can trigger additional disclosures to the employees receiving them.

Mayer Brown unpacks a September 18 IRS Employee Plans newsletter correcting the widespread assumption that every SECURE and SECURE 2.0 amendment is due December 31, 2026. Under the newsletter as the firm reads it, discretionary changes a plan has already put into operation generally do need amendments by the end of 2026, while many required amendments come due only after the relevant provision lands on an IRS Required Amendments List, with later dates generally applying to collectively bargained and governmental plans. A separate [Notice 2026-33](https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/n-26-33.pdf) extends the deadline for optional qualified long-term-care distribution amendments to December 31, 2027. The firm’s practical point is to track the document deadline and the operational compliance date separately.

Haynes Boone walks employers through contributing to Trump Accounts, which the firm describes as traditional IRAs for children under 18 that took effect earlier this year. Ordinary contributions, including qualifying employer contributions, share a $5,000 annual limit per child, with certain government, qualified general and rollover contributions excluded, and an employer program may contribute up to $2,500 per employee, counted within that shared limit rather than on top of it. Qualifying employer contributions are exempt from federal income tax but not from the employer’s Social Security and unemployment payroll taxes, and the firm describes the written-program and nondiscrimination requirements along with open administrative questions. These are accounts for employees’ children, not a new retirement account every adult employee can open, and the analysis is the firm’s reading of the underlying guidance.

Don Trone argues that AI can sharpen a fiduciary committee’s analysis without displacing the committee’s responsibility for judgment. His leadership, stewardship and governance framework treats generated answers as inputs that still need human oversight, relevant evidence and accountability for consequences. The piece is a practitioner’s opinion about sound process, not a Labor Department requirement or a litigation safe harbor, and the framework is Trone’s own.

PLANSPONSOR reports PBGC’s [proposal](https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/10/16/2026-21189/proposed-submission-of-information-collection-for-omb-review-comment-request-special-financial) to expand what multiemployer plans that received special financial assistance file with their annual statements of compliance, adding plan investment policies, allocation information, committee documents and relevant meeting records. Segal’s Susan Boyle discusses the practical burden for funds that already file extensively. Comments on the information-collection proposal are due December 15, and the annual statements run through 2051. It is a comment request, not a new investment rule.

Gallagher’s newly released 2026 U.S. Financial Benchmarks Report, built on a survey of 3,717 U.S. organizations fielded January through March, finds 85% offering retirement benefits but the supporting features uneven. 57% use automatic enrollment and only 5% provide an emergency-savings benefit. The argument is to judge a benefits program by participant outcomes rather than by what is merely offered.

The Foundation’s answer to the recurring question of when SECURE 2.0 amendments are due is an inventory, not a single date. Amendments on the IRS 2024 Required Amendments List are generally due December 31, 2026, the 2025 list generally runs to December 31, 2027, and certain collectively bargained and governmental plans have until the end of 2028 and 2029. Discretionary changes follow their own timing, and operating in compliance now matters independently of when the plan document catches up.

Marcia Wagner and Ari Sonneberg describe how bundled recordkeeping, advice, investment management and plan-administration services have blurred the lines among provider roles. Fiduciary status follows the function actually performed and the authority actually held, not the label on the contract. The firm urges sponsors to map which entity does what, how it and its affiliates are paid, and whether the contract matches operations, because hiring a provider never transfers the duty to monitor it.

Writing in PLANADVISER, Eversheds Sutherland’s David Kaleda pushes back on the notion that collective investment trusts are unregulated. CITs must be maintained by a bank or trust company under federal or state banking oversight, and ERISA’s fiduciary and prohibited-transaction rules apply when plan assets go in. He argues that the growing use of alternative investments inside CITs makes liquidity, valuation and provider oversight the real diligence work, and he critiques aspects of the Labor Department’s proposed safe harbor along the way.

Lasher works through the familiar two-hats problem. An employer acts as a fiduciary when it exercises discretion over plan administration or control over plan assets, and as a settlor, making ordinary business decisions rather than fiduciary ones, when it designs, amends or terminates a plan. The practical point is that titles settle nothing. The analysis runs function by function, so contracts, communications and actual responsibilities need to line up with the hat the employer thinks it is wearing.

Specialists from J.P. Morgan, NISA and NEPC tell PLANSPONSOR that the private-assets question for pension plans is one of sizing rather than suitability. A fully funded frozen plan needing 4% to 5% returns and a terminating plan heading toward a risk transfer have very different room for investments that cannot readily be sold, since an annuity purchase consumes liquid assets and can leave the illiquid holdings stranded. The interviews frame allocation size and timing against each plan’s liabilities and liquidity rather than treating private assets as categorically good or bad.

Andy Ives catalogs the required-minimum-distribution errors that keep recurring, including trying to roll over an RMD, aggregating IRA and 401(k) requirements as if they were interchangeable, and assuming an earlier excess withdrawal reduces the next year’s requirement. He also walks through the limits of the still-working exception and the trap in delaying a first age-73 distribution to the following April 1, which puts two taxable distributions into one year. The missed-distribution penalty is 25%, with correction relief available in some cases.

Husch Blackwell makes the succession case for employee stock ownership plans in breweries, distilleries and wineries, pointing to Harpoon’s 48% employee ownership and Switchback’s full conversion. The article weighs founder liquidity and tax advantages, including the C corporation seller’s deferral conditioned on 30% employee ownership and qualified replacement property, against independent valuation requirements, trustee duties and the repurchase obligation that comes due as employee-owners retire. Liquor licensing and tied-house rules add industry-specific complications.

Mercer argues that longer working lives change benefits design across health, caregiving and retirement at once. The article’s report-based estimates illustrate how interruptions compound, with a five-year career break reducing retirement savings by an estimated 29% and a one-year caregiving break combined with the gender pay gap leaving women 24% behind on average. The recommendations run to prevention, return-to-work support, caregiving flexibility and gradual retirement rather than treating longevity as an investment problem alone.

Two research streams point the same direction. In Guardian’s June survey of 2,082 U.S. adults, 34% said they had planned how to receive income at age 80 and beyond, compared with 48% who had planned for income during their 60s, and 75% worried about unexpected events affecting their retirement savings. Cerulli’s participant research finds 46% want flexibility, about 40% want a concrete action plan, 39% want guarantees and 31% want investment choice. The shared conclusion is that no single income solution fits every participant, and that translating balances into income is where help is wanted.

LIMRA finds that many workers have thought about retirement income but spent little time planning for it. In the survey, 88% have thought about income, yet 76% spent five hours or less on planning in the past year, and only 40% worked with a professional. Those who did reported feeling prepared at 77% versus 47% without, an association the research does not establish as causal. About three-quarters want education on protected income, and a quarter expect such products to cover essentials.

PLANSPONSOR stitches together three surveys on how economic pressure reshapes retirement expectations. In F&G’s August survey of 2,001 adults 50 and older with at least $100,000 in investable assets, 51% of pre-retirees expect to semi-retire and 75% are considering delaying retirement. WTW’s global survey ties financial stress to burnout and missed work, and Payroll Integrations finds 62% of employees prefer higher pay or cost-of-living increases over additional financial tools. The common thread is affordability, not lack of education.

Cerulli reports that participants who interacted with their recordkeeper’s representatives were markedly more likely to rate their satisfaction nine or ten, 46% versus 28%, and to report high retirement confidence, 35% versus 23%. Only about a third had any such contact in the past year. The differences are associations rather than proof that advice caused them, and sponsors weighing recordkeeper advice programs still need to oversee the rollover conflicts that can come with them.

Voya’s first financial-confidence index, built from a June 22 to July 5 survey of nearly 4,100 benefits-eligible workers in workplace retirement plans, finds confidence running ahead of behavior, 67 against 62 on its 100-point scale. Workers who used workplace financial education reported stronger financial habits, with a behavior score of 71 against 59 for nonusers, and adviser users scored 69 against 57. The survey shows associations, not proof that the education caused the differences. Covering a $2,500 emergency ranked as the top confidence driver, and 35% report being always or often financially stressed.

The underlying WTW numbers show physical and financial well-being moving in opposite directions. Workers reporting they are physically thriving rose to 64% from 54% in 2019 while those feeling financially secure fell to 36% from 46%, and about half live paycheck to paycheck. Health costs register as a retirement barrier for 47% of respondents, and the high-stress group reports 23.6 days of combined absence and presenteeism, time at work impaired by poor health or stress. The article argues for affordable core health, retirement and leave benefits rather than more choices.

Scott Danner of Steward Partners writes about financial advisers who sell their practices and keep working through a defined transition. His focus is the adviser’s own succession, identity, client relationships and compensation, with practical advice running to defined duties, pay and transition milestones. It is business-succession commentary from inside the advisory industry rather than guidance on employer plan design.

NAPA’s Ted Godbout reports on the 2027 Social Security adjustment and the related payroll changes employers need to prepare for. Benefits rise 3.6%, while the wage base subject to Social Security tax increases to $192,300. The article also covers advocates’ concerns that the worker-based inflation measure used for the adjustment does not reflect older households’ spending patterns. Employers should distinguish these announced Social Security figures from the separate IRS limits for retirement-plan contributions, which were still forthcoming when the article appeared.

Senior advocates say the 3.6% Social Security increase still won’t keep up with the expenses many retirees face. Their criticism centers on the inflation measure used to set benefits, which reflects spending by workers rather than older households. Some favor an index weighted toward older consumers’ costs, including healthcare. That would require a policy change. The announced increase follows the existing formula, and advocacy for a different measure hasn’t changed the amount payable in 2027.

A frozen pension plan with a surplus may offer an employer another way to provide retirement benefits. Milliman examines reopening a defined benefit plan and using accumulated assets or a prefunding balance, which reflects certain prior contributions, to help support new benefits. The appeal depends on cash-flow projections, contribution rules, workforce needs and the cost of future promises. A surplus measured now doesn’t guarantee that a reopened plan will remain inexpensive as interest rates, investment returns and employee demographics change.

A business owner has her retirement plan buy commercial property and then lets her business use it without paying rent. Ferenczy Benefits Law Center’s hypothetical shows how an investment that looks convenient can turn into a prohibited transaction. Correcting it requires more than starting rent payments now. The analysis addresses valuation, restoring lost earnings and unwinding the improper arrangement, along with the possible role of the Labor Department’s voluntary correction program. A correction route doesn’t automatically erase every tax or fiduciary consequence.

Wagner attorneys Harold Ashner and Israel Goldowitz urge PBGC to tailor penalties to the seriousness of a violation and the sponsor’s efforts to comply. Their comments favor meaningful credit for prompt correction, reasonable oversight of outside providers and circumstances where an error caused no harm. They also question automatic escalation based on repeat violations. These are recommendations on a proposed rule, rather than an adopted penalty schedule or a guarantee of relief for a particular filing failure.

An unfinished audit leaves a 403(b) sponsor with a filing problem, not an obvious extension. Groom Law Group and CAPTRUST recommend getting a realistic completion date from the auditor and taking that information to outside ERISA counsel. The DOL’s Delinquent Filer Voluntary Compliance Program may help address a late filing, but the authors advise getting counsel’s direction on whether and when to use it. Their answer doesn’t endorse submitting an incomplete Form 5500.

Year-end review needs to reach beyond the amendment signature page. Milliman’s checklist for single-employer retirement plans covers participant notices, benefit-statement delivery, annual filings, pension premiums and funding certifications, alongside required and discretionary amendments. The administrative work differs between defined benefit and defined contribution plans, and some obligations depend on the plan’s design and calendar. The bulletin also urges sponsors to look backward for amendments that should already have been adopted and consider the available correction procedures if something was missed. Its useful organizing point is to put document changes, operational compliance and participant communications on the same review list. A document deadline doesn’t by itself tell the sponsor when a provision must operate or when employees must receive a notice.

A retirement plan can need cash even when its participants aren’t asking for withdrawals. A termination, recordkeeper change or merger can create demands that an investment’s redemption restrictions make difficult to meet. Fred Reish examines the plan-level liquidity example in the DOL’s proposed investment-selection rule. One proposed path would let fiduciaries rely on an eligible mutual fund’s regulated liquidity program. For other vehicles, including collective investment trusts, the example calls for a written representation or appropriate due diligence about a comparable program, critical review of any representation, and attention to information that calls it into question. The proposal would offer a route to a prudence presumption for this factor, not the only way to satisfy ERISA. A representation would still need to be read and understood, not merely filed.

Finhabits estimates that 13.6 million Latino adults could meet the income requirements for the federal Saver’s Match, which applies to eligible contributions beginning with the 2027 tax year. That’s potential eligibility, not a count of people who will enroll or receive a match. Its report models $615 billion to $1.02 trillion in retirement balances over 30 years using assumed participation, contributions, matching payments and investment returns. Those figures are illustrations, not forecasts. The report’s practical emphasis is on making retirement saving easier to understand and sustain, including guidance in English and Spanish. An incentive won’t bring people into the system by itself if opening an account, making contributions or claiming the match remains confusing.

Retirement income terminology can promise more than a product delivers. The Institutional Retirement Income Council wants the industry to distinguish broad retirement income strategies from contractual guarantees, and lifetime income from payments intended to last only a fixed period. PLANSPONSOR reports on Kevin Crain’s proposed vocabulary, which also separates protected income from guaranteed income. A systematic withdrawal program, for example, doesn’t become a promise of income for life just because someone calls it a retirement paycheck. For sponsors evaluating products and participant communications, the useful question is what backs the payment and how long that backing lasts.

Only 34 percent of adults surveyed for Guardian’s Retirement Redefined research said they had actively planned for income at age 80 and beyond, compared with 48 percent who had planned for ages 60 through 69. The research covered more than 2,000 U.S. adults and found uncertainty about which years of retirement would cost the most. More than half hadn’t worked with a financial adviser. Guardian argues that advice and guaranteed income products can help address the gap; that recommendation comes from an insurer with an interest in the market. The practical question for retirement education is broader than an account balance. Participants also need to consider how they’ll pay their bills if retirement lasts much longer than they expected.

Participants may trust their employer’s retirement plan without wanting to leave their money there forever. An Allspring and Defined Contribution Institutional Investment Association survey of more than 1,500 respondents found that nearly a third wanted guaranteed income benefits in their workplace plan, while 70 percent placed greater importance on access and control. Adviser use increased sharply as retirement approached, and participants working with advisers were more likely to move assets out of the plan. Allspring’s analysis urges sponsors to think explicitly about whether they want to retain retirees’ assets or help participants move into another arrangement. Low fees, useful guidance and a range of income options matter to that choice. The survey describes competing participant preferences; it doesn’t establish that an in-plan annuity or a rollover is the right answer for everyone.

The rules an employer thinks its retirement plan follows may not be the rules in the signed document. Ary Rosenbaum urges sponsors to revisit eligibility, employer contributions, vesting, loans and other provisions rather than relying on memory or an old explanation from a provider. A change in personnel or payroll practices can widen the gap between the written terms and day-to-day operation. His recommendation is to read the document with the people administering the plan and resolve discrepancies. Routine familiarity with the provisions makes it easier to identify a problem before it becomes a recurring operational error.

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.

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.

October is Employee Ownership Month, and McAfee & Taft’s Judy Burdg uses it to walk business owners through the ESOP as a succession tool. An employee stock ownership plan, or ESOP, is a retirement plan funded with company stock, which gives a retiring owner a built-in buyer, potential deferral of capital gains on the sale, and significant tax advantages when the company becomes wholly ESOP-owned. The obligations run alongside the benefits. An ESOP company must pay for annual valuations, maintain fiduciary oversight, repurchase shares when employees retire or take distributions, and keep enough cash flow to fund those repurchase obligations on top of normal operations.

Nationwide Retirement Institute’s 2026 Healthcare Costs Survey quantifies a tradeoff benefits teams have sensed. Among current GLP-1 users, nearly half worry the drugs’ cost is eroding their retirement savings. Fifty-four percent have changed financial behavior to afford the medications, including 17 percent taking on debt and 14 percent each withdrawing from savings or trimming retirement contributions. Out-of-pocket costs average $203 a month for users whose insurance does not fully cover the drugs. Among surveyed GLP-1 users, 88 percent feel better about their long-term health, and 64 percent say they may retire later because of it. But 59 percent doubt they can afford the medications in retirement.

Milliman’s Vanessa Vaag works through whether a cash balance plan should let participants who reach age 59½ move their money out while still working, an option the Bipartisan American Miners Act opened in 2019. Despite the name, that law’s distribution provision is not limited to miners. It lowered the minimum in-service distribution age from 62 to 59½ for every employer’s pension plan, cash balance plans included, and a sponsor adopts the feature by amending its plan. The appeal is control. A participant who cannot direct the pooled plan’s investments can roll a vested benefit to an IRA or the employer’s 401(k) without leaving the job. Employers may reduce future pension obligations and federal pension-insurance premiums, but they need enough cash to pay departing balances and must weigh the accounting effects, especially if many participants move money out at once. Employees give up the plan’s federal pension protection and lifetime payment option for the money they withdraw. The decision facing a sponsor is whether the added flexibility solves a real workforce problem, and Vaag recommends starting with an estimate of how many employees would actually use the option.

Candace Finn untangles which SECURE and SECURE 2.0 amendments are actually due December 31, 2026, drawing on the IRS’s recent clarification. For required changes, the IRS’s annual amendment list helps determine when the paperwork is due, and a provision does not land on that list until the underlying guidance is settled. The Roth catch-up requirement, for example, is expected on the 2027 list, which would push its amendment deadline out to the end of 2029, and future lists are expected to cover automatic enrollment, long-term part-time employees and remaining required minimum distribution changes. More time to amend the document does not mean more time to comply with the underlying requirement, which applies on its own schedule. Discretionary provisions are the ones still on the 2026 clock. Under Notice 2024-2, optional SECURE 2.0 features a plan already operates, such as Roth employer contributions, generally must be documented by December 31, 2026. Finn’s practical warning is to resist checking every optional box in the amendment package, because a provision the recordkeeper and payroll system cannot administer is a plan document saying one thing while operations say another.

The White House marked the formal launch of Trump Accounts this week, with roughly 60 million children registered through the auto-enrollment added late in the program’s design and $1,000 in seed money for eligible children. Since the July 4 start the accounts have taken in more than $4.5 billion, including $1.3 billion in seed contributions, $600 million from families and $2.6 billion in philanthropic gifts, the latter anchored by a $6.25 billion commitment from Michael and Susan Dell. Family and friends may contribute up to $5,000 a year, and employers may contribute up to $2,500 within that cap. For sponsors, Aon’s Melissa Elbert points to Treasury’s continued support for running dependent contributions through a Section 125 cafeteria plan, which she calls a middle ground that lets employers facilitate participation through existing benefits infrastructure even if they never contribute a dollar themselves.

Haynes Boone distills the sponsor to-do list from the Fourth Circuit’s Kelly v. Altria decision, which applied the dictionary meaning of operate and held that the administrative services agreement between Fidelity and the plan sponsor is a document under which the plan is operated, and therefore must be furnished to a participant on written request under ERISA section 104(b)(4). The firm notes the holding conflicts with the line of cases, including the Ninth Circuit’s Hughes decision, that limit required disclosures to documents describing plan terms, administration or finances. Inventory the agreements under which your plan actually runs, check their confidentiality clauses against a disclosure obligation they may not have anticipated, and include them when answering document requests, because the cost of guessing wrong is statutory penalties that accrue daily.

MetLife’s 2026 pension risk transfer poll surveyed 250 defined benefit plan sponsors with at least $100 million in assets and goals to reduce pension risk. Among those sponsors, 88 percent are considering transferring obligations to an insurer and 80 percent plan to shed their pension liabilities entirely within five years, and among the sponsors open to an insurer deal, 32 percent expect to complete one within two years. Half name interest rates as the top catalyst, and the share ranking an insurer’s financial strength as the leading selection factor jumped to 65 percent from 33 percent a year ago. October Three’s companion survey of insurers reports that full plan terminations made up 66 percent of these transactions in the first half of 2026, and that deals covering only retirees already receiving benefits made up another 28 percent. Milliman puts the competitive cost of buying annuities for retirees at 99.9 percent of the liabilities recorded for accounting purposes, the fourth straight month below 100 percent. The insurers’ chief complaint lands on sponsors. Incomplete participant data was the top obstacle to onboarding for 72 percent of carriers.

Financial pressure is affecting workers’ retirement savings and their performance at work, EBN reports from Goldman Sachs Asset Management’s 2026 retirement survey. The survey of 5,106 people found the share increasing their retirement savings fell to 39 percent from 55 percent, the largest single-year drop in six years, while nearly 70 percent have delayed a major financial goal and 66 percent of Gen Z, millennial and Gen X respondents expect to delay retirement. Inside the workplace, 54 percent say money worries make it hard to focus at work, 32 percent missed work in the past year over a financial problem, 34 percent are likely to job-hunt mainly to improve their finances, and 61 percent work a second job, mostly out of need. The bright spot is planning. Among the 64 percent with a personalized retirement plan, 72 percent believe they are on track, versus 33 percent without one, and Goldman’s strategists pitch that gap as a plan design question. Strain also does not fade with income. Workers earning above $300,000 report living paycheck to paycheck more often than those in the middle of the income range.

Kevin Crain of the Institutional Retirement Income Council argues the industry’s own vocabulary is a barrier to retirement income adoption, citing research in which 72 percent of respondents wanted an annuity presented as payments for spending but only 21 percent wanted the identical product presented as an investment. His proposed language framework treats retirement income as a category rather than a product, and draws hard lines the marketplace currently blurs. Guaranteed income requires a contractual guarantee, protected income does not mean guaranteed, and a systematic withdrawal program cannot be sold as a paycheck for life unless it is built to last a lifetime with a disclosed guarantee. Crain, a former recordkeeper executive, says most of the jargon originated with recordkeepers and providers, and points to the Social Security claiming-age terminology bill awaiting signature as evidence that even entrenched language can be standardized.

State auto-IRA mandates keep pushing small employers to choose between the state program and a plan of their own, and recordkeeper 401GO argues the industry’s disconnected technology systems are not ready for the volume. In Colorado, new plans jumped to 18.4 percent of the state’s private-sector plans in the year SecureSavings launched, from 12.6 percent the year before, and two more deadlines arrive soon, Rhode Island’s RISavers on October 15 and Minnesota’s Secure Choice on December 31. The coverage gap the mandates target remains wide, with 59 percent of workers at businesses under 100 employees having plan access against 91 percent at employers of 500 or more.

Jeff Crowell of OpenArc and Brian McDonald of Grantd name the gap between equity plan administration and equity comprehension. Recordkeeper portals show employees what they own, when it vests and what transactions are available, but not what the award means for their taxes, cash needs or concentration risk, and employees tend not to ask, partly because the questions feel too basic and partly because selling company stock feels like oversharing with the employer. The authors argue for individualized guidance kept separate from plan administration, surfacing an approaching option expiration or a tax withholding shortfall before it becomes urgent, with a clean handoff to a financial adviser when an equity question becomes a household planning question.

Mercer works through the mechanics of S. 5040, the bill from the top Democrats on Senate Finance and House Ways and Means targeting mega retirement balances. Starting in 2027, high earners, with income thresholds running from $225,000 to $450,000 by filing status, could make no new contributions once combined DC plan and IRA balances exceed $10 million, with a 6 percent excise tax backstopping the limit. Starting in 2034 the bill would force distributions of half the excess over $10 million, Roth first for balances above $20 million, and employers would be required to permit those distributions. Mercer also flags what was dropped from the 2021 version, the ban on Roth conversions of after-tax amounts and the $2.5 million account reporting requirement. The proposal faces long odds in the current Congress, but it is the clearest marker yet of where Democratic tax writers would start if the majority changes.

Employers that file Form 8955-SSA electronically need to prepare for a change in IRS systems. The FIRE system stops accepting filings November 19, and the newer IRIS platform becomes the only electronic option in January, so current FIRE users need an IRIS Transmitter Control Code application moving before the 2027 filing season. In the underlying question, Groom Law Group attorneys and CAPTRUST’s Michael Webb explain that Form 8955-SSA, which reports former employees who have earned benefits they haven’t collected, does not travel with the Form 5500 through the Labor Department’s EFAST2 system; it is a stand-alone return filed directly with the IRS, and electronic filing is generally mandatory for anyone required to file ten or more information returns in a year.

Three research shops land on the same gap. In DCIIA’s survey of pre-retirees, only 22 percent said their workplace plan offered guaranteed lifetime income, and another 29 percent did not know whether theirs does. Participants with access to guaranteed income or financial advice were more likely to report investing in it; 56 percent of those with access said they had invested, 68 percent of those working with an adviser held guaranteed income versus 40 percent of those without one, and the share rose to 86 percent after an in-depth income conversation with that adviser. LIMRA’s companion report has 71 percent of pre-retirees interested in protected lifetime income, with fees, loss of control and locked-up money as the stated holdups. Interest is substantial, but availability, fees and concerns about access to the money all appear to affect uptake.

Two studies published October 6 map how the line between plan advice and wealth management keeps blurring. Cerulli and Morningstar’s Building the Bridge to Wealth finds 63 percent of surveyed advisers treat DC plans as at least a moderate priority for wealth prospecting, while 40 percent of participants already work with an adviser and, among those who do not, 20 percent want to hire one and 45 percent are undecided. The barriers are perception; 54 percent of unadvised participants believe they are not wealthy enough and 67 percent doubt advisory fees are worth the cost. A companion Crisil Coalition Greenwich study of hybrid investors adds a caution for the industry, clients who combine advised and self-directed accounts are 67 percent more likely to consider leaving their adviser and three times more open to automated advice. Sponsors should expect more financial wellness programs and one-on-ones that are also, candidly, prospecting.

BlackRock’s Future of Wealth report surveys 1,067 affluent and high-net-worth women alongside 409 advisers, 84 percent of them male, and finds the two groups describing different clients. Women rank growing wealth, preserving wealth and creating retirement income as their top priorities; advisers guessed preservation, supporting family and life transitions, and ranked growing wealth eighth. The biggest disconnect is where the money came from. 79 percent of the women say salary and career earnings built their wealth, while 63 percent of advisers assume inheritance and 62 percent assume marriage or partnership. With women projected to control $34 trillion in U.S. investable assets by 2030, BlackRock argues the workplace, with its equity compensation, plan savings and executive benefits, is where engagement starts.

Payroll Integrations’ 2026 Employee Financial Wellness Report, fielded through Dynata, finds 82 percent of employees still contributing to their workplace retirement plan but only 34 percent expecting to retire comfortably. The number that should bother HR is about its own programs; employee confidence in employer financial wellness support fell from 74 percent to 35 percent in a year. Cost of living leads retirement worries at 45 percent, ahead of Social Security at 34 percent, and 22 percent have already dipped into retirement savings with another 19 percent considering it in the next year. The spillover is concrete. 38 percent say financial stress has strongly affected their mental health at work, 23 percent have declined employer benefits because of cost, and 63 percent have considered changing jobs over their finances, half of those specifically for better benefits.

The SECURE Acts raised the statutory required minimum distribution ages to 72 and then 73, but Code section 401(a)(9) sets the latest permissible commencement date, not the plan’s own. A defined benefit plan whose document independently defines its required beginning date as April 1 following age 70 1/2 may keep starting benefits at 70 1/2, a result the preamble to Treasury’s 2024 final RMD regulations confirms directly. The answer lives in the plan document rather than the statute, so check whether yours states its own age or merely incorporates the Code by reference. The amendment clock runs either way; required SECURE amendments, including the technical RMD updates, are generally due by December 31 of this year.

Employee Fiduciary’s explainer walks through match design end to end with 2026 numbers in place, the $24,500 deferral limit, the $72,000 cap on total contributions and the $360,000 compensation limit. It covers the standard formulas and their tradeoffs, single-tier and multi-tier matches, stretch formulas that buy more deferral per match dollar, safe harbor designs, including the automatic-enrollment variety, with their vesting rules, and discretionary matches that trade predictability for flexibility. The true-up discussion is the part worth confirming with payroll; employees who max out early can miss part of the match if it is calculated paycheck by paycheck and the plan does not make a year-end adjustment. Roth matching contributions under SECURE 2.0 get a practical treatment too.

White & Case previews the American Rescue Plan Act change that takes effect for tax years beginning after December 31, 2026. The $1 million deduction limit will reach an additional five employees beyond the current covered officers, and the new five need not be officers at all, just the next highest compensated employees, determined fresh each year rather than tagged forever under the once-covered-always-covered rule. Proposed regulations issued in January 2025 would count employees across the affiliated group, including foreign subsidiaries, and certain workers employed through professional employer organizations. Final regulations may or may not land before year-end, but the effective date does not move, so compensation committees modeling 2027 should identify the likely additional five now and consider whether any planned payments belong in 2026.

Joshua Dietch of NMG Consulting argues that the growth of pooled employer plans is changing who controls the relationship with retirement advisers. By his firm’s numbers, the share of advisers recommending fully bundled arrangements has grown from 40 percent in 2015 to about half today, more than half of DC specialist advisers are interested in pooled plans against less than a third of wealth advisers, and winning the adviser can now mean winning the next ten plans that adviser brings. For employers considering a pooled plan, Dietch raises a practical question. Does its growing size primarily benefit employers, advisers or providers?

Comments closed October 5 on Notice 2026-48, the IRS’s framework for delivering the Saver’s Match, the Treasury-funded 50 percent match on the first $2,000 of retirement savings that replaces the Saver’s Credit, with deposits starting in 2028 for 2027 contributions. ERIC backs the registration path, which moves the money into a worker’s plan as an ordinary rollover, arguing it lets workers benefit without forcing plans to build new tracking systems or send employee data to the government, and it warns against an automatic match path that could require real-time eligibility feeds to the IRS. NAGDCA supports a conduit IRA, asks for clear Roth-conversion procedures without withholding at conversion, and wants final regulations promptly plus good-faith transition relief. The IRS has confirmed that plans won’t be required to accept the contributions at all, which may become its own design question for sponsors.

Democrats on House Education and Workforce introduced a three-bill retirement package. The Workers’ Retirement Savings Protection Act from Ranking Member Bobby Scott would extend ERISA fiduciary status to one-time advice, including rollover recommendations, reviving concepts from the vacated Retirement Security Rule in statutory form. The Employee and Retiree Access to Justice Act from Rep. DeSaulnier and Sen. Smith would make forced arbitration clauses, class action waivers and representation waivers unenforceable whether signed before or after a dispute, and would ban discretionary clauses outside multiemployer plans so benefit denials get a fresh look in court. The Protecting Workers’ Benefits Act would treat litigation recoveries as plan assets, add a participant incentive award of 0.5 to 1 percent of any recovery, and require consolidation of duplicative suits. The bills lay out House Democrats’ priorities, though their prospects in the current Congress are uncertain.

Vanguard’s How America Saves data show 51 percent of workers earning $150,000 or more hit the 401(k) contribution limit last year, down from 60 percent in 2018, and the share fell from 22 to 10 percent in the $100,000 to $149,999 band. Vanguard attributes part of the drop to mechanics, since higher limits and wage growth make the max harder to reach, but EBRI’s Craig Copeland describes a real behavioral shift. Some savers contribute enough to receive the full employer match, then direct additional savings to health savings accounts, Roth IRAs or brokerage accounts. Their reasons include tax diversification and, depending on the account and withdrawal, easier access to the money. Fidelity counts a record 769,000 401(k) millionaires, and while 97 percent of its plans now offer a Roth option, only about 19 percent of workers with access use it. Alicia Munnell supplies the counterweight, “We all need a little discipline and a little guardrails.”

December 31, 2026 is the deadline for most calendar-year retirement plans to document, in a formal amendment, the CARES, SECURE and SECURE 2.0 changes they’ve been operating under, from Roth catch-ups for high earners and long-term part-time eligibility through super catch-ups, higher RMD ages and the optional early-withdrawal provisions. Informal IRS guidance from September 16 suggests some SECURE 2.0 amendment deadlines may slip, but the firm still recommends documenting everything implemented as part of this year-end. The discretionary review is where the litigation lessons show up. The firm suggests forfeiture language that makes the allocation choice a plan-design decision rather than a fiduciary one, claims procedures with limitations and venue provisions, a look at arbitration language, and beneficiary procedures that answer what happens after a divorce or when a beneficiary dies before being paid.

A Harris Poll of 2,000 moderate-income adults finds 80 percent of Gen X and millennial savers think the economic rules that served older workers have changed, 63 percent expect Social Security to be depleted before they can draw it, and 85 percent want guaranteed income as a core 401(k) feature. The follow-through lags, though. Eighty-six percent of those familiar with annuities find them appealing, 53 percent find them too complex, and just 3 percent expect annuities to carry them in retirement. Athene, which sells annuities, commissioned the survey.

The funded ratio of the Milliman 100 companies’ pension plans jumped to 114.5 percent as of September 30, from 112.2 percent a month earlier, putting the aggregate surplus at $160 billion. Higher interest rates drove the improvement. The rate used to value future pension payments rose from 6 percent to 6.47 percent, a level last seen in May 2009, reducing the estimated obligations by $54 billion. That more than offset a 2.21 percent investment loss. Milliman’s baseline projection now has the ratio at 114.7 percent by year end and 115.5 percent by the end of 2027. The improvement depends heavily on interest rates. Falling rates could increase the value of those obligations again.

December 31 is the deadline for 2026 required minimum distributions, and this plain-English refresher has two details worth stealing for participant communications. First, the 1959 drafting glitch. SECURE 2.0 assigns people born that year to both age 73 and age 75, and until proposed regulations finalize the fix, the safe answer is 73. Second, the first-year trap. Waiting until April 1 to take a first RMD means two taxable RMDs land in the same year. On inherited accounts, beneficiaries under the 10-year rule generally owe annual withdrawals in years one through nine only when the original owner died on or after his required beginning date, and the IRS’s penalty waiver for those missed annual withdrawals ended after 2024. The missed-RMD excise tax is 25 percent, dropping to 10 with prompt correction.

The ISO rules that trip people up in practice, collected in one place. Incentive stock options can go only to employees of corporations, require stockholder approval within 12 months of plan adoption, and must be designated as ISOs at grant. Favorable tax treatment generally requires holding the shares for more than two years after grant and more than one year after exercise. The annual limit covers options first becoming exercisable on up to $100,000 of stock, measured at its value when granted. Employees owning more than 10 percent of the company’s voting power face additional restrictions, including a higher exercise price and a five-year maximum option term. And if employees will only exercise at an exit and sell immediately, the favorable tax treatment evaporates in the early sale anyway, so plain nonqualified options would have been simpler.

The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation has temporarily waived a year-end report triggered by shrinking active participation in a pension plan. The test generally looks for a drop below 80 percent of the start-of-year count, after adding back departures already reported separately as single-cause events. Morgan Lewis notes the trigger has been tripping most often in frozen plans with few remaining active participants. Technical Update 26-1, issued September 18, covers reporting deadlines on or after that date and lasts until an amended final rule takes effect. Reporting rules for layoffs, shutdowns and other single-cause reductions remain in place, along with their existing exceptions. PBGC says attrition reports rarely flag meaningful risks and cost more to prepare than the information is worth.

Sanyam Parikh and Sterling Perkinson turn the Trump Account rules into an implementation checklist. A contribution program must be a separate written plan; up to $2,500 per employee per year, a cap that applies per employee rather than per dependent, is excluded from income but still subject to FICA and FUTA; and salary-reduction contributions run through the cafeteria plan and can fund only a dependent’s account. Two details matter before launch. Under the September 30 temporary regulations, an automatically created account that hasn’t been claimed can’t receive employer contributions, so payroll needs to verify claiming before routing a dollar, and contributions report on the W-2 under new code TA. Their ERISA tip is to set eligibility at age 21 with a year of service, which keeps working minors, and the thorniest coverage questions, out of the program.

Prudential’s 2026 Retirement Pulse Survey asked 3,023 pre-retirees and retirees age 50 and up about spending their own money, and only 14 percent were comfortable using retirement savings each month on things they enjoy. Forty percent would rather leave money behind than risk running short, 29 percent take pride in a bank balance that never moves, and wealth doesn’t cure it: among respondents with at least $500,000 saved, 61 percent still weren’t comfortable spending on themselves. The reasons given are Social Security uncertainty, inflation and health costs, and a third don’t know how long the money has to last. One Prudential planner summed up the job: “I have to give my clients permission to spend.”

TIAA’s “Retirement in the Age of AI and GLP-1s” survey polled 1,000 adults through KRC Research in late July. On longevity, 53 percent worry more about outliving their savings than about underspending, and 43 percent doubt traditional retirement planning accounts for lives that stretch into the 90s. On what AI will do to their finances, 27 percent expect breakthrough treatments to raise costs, 22 percent expect efficiency to lower them, 20 percent expect little effect, and the rest can’t say. Separately, a third are seriously concerned AI could threaten their earning potential before they retire, a worry that peaks with Generation Z. TIAA’s read is that these are all longevity problems, and its consultants’ advice to employers is to weigh guaranteed lifetime income in plan design on par with fees and the investment menu.

Milliman’s midyear study puts aggregate multiemployer pension funding at 106 percent as of June 30, up from 100 percent a year earlier, with 69 percent of plans fully funded and the system holding roughly $55 billion in surplus. The Special Financial Assistance program is a large part of the story: 161 plans have received nearly $78 billion in grants since 2021, which Milliman credits with 9 percentage points of the aggregate funded level. Co-author Tim Connor points to strong markets and contributions that keep outpacing plan costs.

Consultants at October Three, J.P. Morgan Asset Management and Russell Investments describe the same change in client conversations. With average corporate pension funding at 99 percent this year, up from 77 percent in 2008 by Russell’s tally of public filings, employers with fully funded pension plans are asking how to use them rather than how to wind them down. The options include reopening frozen plans, improving benefits, and applying surplus to shore up an acquired company’s pension, and some employers are watching for legislation that would let surplus move into the 401(k) plan. For a decade the standard endgames were keeping a frozen plan quietly invested in bonds or terminating it by buying annuities. Neither is the automatic answer anymore.

What does an employer do when its pension no longer needs contributions? Advisers from Gallagher, Cerulli, Alight and Milliman walk through two different pools of money. Company cash freed up by a contribution holiday can go to debt, buybacks or deals. Assets already inside the plan are plan assets, and the choices there run from maintaining a funding cushion to help absorb market losses (the advisers quoted suggest 105 to 110 percent) to applying surplus to retiree cost-of-living increases or a qualified replacement plan, or continuing to de-risk through liability transfers and cash balance conversions. The thread running through the interviews is that the right answer turns on company-specific risk tolerance, not an industry default.

A retirement plan can run smoothly and still fall short for the workforce it serves, writes T. Katuri Kaye. In her example, 90 percent participation looks strong until you ask whether first-year employees are in, whether lower-paid workers contribute enough to collect the full match, and whether anyone ever moves off the auto-enrollment default rate. The four steps use data employers already receive from recordkeepers and payroll. She closes on governance. Choosing the matching formula is a business decision about plan design, while investigating why employees miss the match is fiduciary work governed by ERISA, and committee minutes should make clear which kind of decision was being made.

A new ICI and ISS Market Intelligence profile of large ERISA 403(b) plans, built from Form 5500 filings for 5,332 plans with at least 100 participants, finds employer contributions reached $13 billion in 2023, two and a half times the 2009 figure. Costs moved the other way. The average participant was in a plan costing 0.45 percent of assets in 2023, down from 0.68 percent in 2009. The share of large plans offering an employer contribution rose from 71 percent to 87 percent, target-date funds spread from about half of plan menus to 90 percent, and index funds now hold 42 percent of plan assets. For 403(b) sponsors wondering how their plan compares, the benchmarks just got a refresh.

In the only benefits entry in the IRS’s Friday, October 2 batch of private letter rulings, the agency approved a single-employer pension sponsor’s request to use substitute mortality tables, tables built from the plan’s own participant experience rather than the standard government tables, in its minimum funding calculations under Code section 430. The approval runs up to 10 years starting with the plan year beginning November 1, 2026, and follows a new experience study. The same sponsor received a similar ruling in 2021. These approvals are routine, but they’re a reminder that a large plan whose population differs from the standard tables can ask to fund based on its own data. The approval carries annual reporting conditions, and the standard tables snap back if the sponsor stops supplying the data. A private letter ruling binds the IRS only as to the taxpayer who requested it.

Fred Reish continues his series on the Labor Department’s proposed rule for selecting investments in participant-directed plans, this time on liquidity at the plan level rather than the participant level. The proposal’s example asks fiduciaries weighing a fund that holds private assets to think about what happens when the plan itself needs to exit the investment, say in a recordkeeper change or a corporate merger, and whether redemptions by other investors could knock the fund off its target allocations. The proposal would treat fiduciaries as prudent if they evaluate the fund’s maximum illiquid allocation, how long a sale would take without giving up value, and the required exit notice. Reish’s caution is that weighing other plans’ redemptions isn’t common practice today and most committees aren’t equipped for it, which points toward delegating the analysis to an investment manager with authority to make the decision.

Fred Barstein catalogs what stands between the retirement industry and its favorite growth story, advisers turning plan participants into wealth management clients. The hurdles are practical. Most participants don’t hold enough assets to interest advisers under traditional service models, engagement is famously hard, recordkeeper technology in some shops dates to the 1990s, and there’s no standard format for plan or participant data. He also notes that recent litigation means sharing participant data may now require plan sponsor permission, and that some providers would rather keep participant relationships for themselves. His bottom line is that convergence is real but will take longer and cost more than the pitch decks suggest. Sponsors fielding wealth-service offers from their plan providers can borrow his checklist.

In a new Trucker Huss alert, Bryan Card walks through April's Technical Release 2026-01 on proxy advisory firms, the consultants who advise large investors on how to vote their shares in corporate elections. The Labor Department said such a firm can become an ERISA fiduciary two ways: by exercising control over votes tied to plan shares, or by regularly giving individualized voting advice for a fee. A contract disclaimer saying the advice won't be a 'primary basis' for decisions doesn't settle the question if the actual relationship says otherwise, and the department concluded ERISA generally doesn't preempt state laws requiring proxy advisers to disclose recommendations driven by nonfinancial considerations. This matters mainly for plans invested through collective investment trusts and separately managed accounts, because the shares those vehicles hold are plan assets whose votes belong to the plan. Shares held inside a mutual fund generally are not, so advice about voting them usually isn't fiduciary advice to the plan.

Ary Rosenbaum's short take on Technical Release 2026-02, in which the Labor Department concluded that Trump Accounts and most employer contribution programs tied to them won't be treated as pension plans under ERISA. The accounts belong to children, not employees, and the department described limits on employer involvement that keep a program outside Title I. His point for employers is that the guidance answers the ERISA-coverage question and that question only; the written-program, certification, and contribution-limit requirements still apply.

Ron Surz questions how personalized an investment service can be when it's chosen automatically for workers who haven't provided any information about their finances or comfort with risk. A qualified default investment alternative is the investment a 401(k) plan uses for employees who never make a choice, so, he argues, the personalization in a managed-account default rests entirely on recordkeeper data about age and wealth, with no read on how much risk the person is willing to take. Of the roughly $16 trillion the research firm Cerulli counts in managed accounts across workplace plans and IRAs, Surz puts less than $1 trillion in the default version, and a 2024 survey by the consulting firm NEPC found 46% of plans offer managed accounts while only 9% default participants into them. He favors customized target-date funds built to workforce demographics instead.

Roughly half of plan sponsors offer managed accounts, professionally managed investments tailored to the individual participant, but the research firm Cerulli finds only about 5 percent of participants use one. Brokerage windows, which let participants buy investments beyond the plan's own menu, show up in 29 percent of plans, rising past 60 percent among the largest. The panel urged employers considering any personalized option to ask whether workers would actually use it and whether the added cost over a target-date fund is justified for workers whose finances are still simple. Customization that looks past age and risk tolerance to outside assets, spousal income, and Social Security timing costs more than the default it replaces.

Fred Barstein argues that guaranteed-income options have struggled to gain ground in 401(k) plans despite 20 years of predictions. Nothing requires them, few sponsors ask for them, and advisers' financial incentives, he argues, can favor rollovers over income products offered inside a plan. He cites T. Rowe Price data that 76 percent of billion-dollar plan sponsors want to retain participant assets while more than 95 percent of smaller plans don't. He predicts adoption will arrive the way target-date funds arrived, through automatic enrollment into a default investment that includes a guaranteed income component, not through persuading participants one at a time.

The Economic Innovation Group's updated census-data analysis puts the coverage gap at 76.2 million workers: 61 million employed by an organization that offers them no plan, 15 million self-employed. Nearly half of private-sector workers (49.1 percent) lack access, and among part-time workers the number is 77 percent. The gap is especially wide between lower-paid and higher-paid workers. Among the lowest-paid tenth of private-sector workers, 88 percent lack access, against 14 percent of the highest-paid tenth. Only 37 percent of workers received any employer contribution in 2025, with a median of about $3,000. EIG's policy answer is the Retirement Savings for Americans Act, a House bill that would create federally administered accounts for uncovered workers.