About 401(k) Monitor
401(k) Monitor is an independent data publication. It reads official SEC and DOL retirement-plan filings and republishes the 401(k) match, vesting and fee facts they contain, with every number naming the exact filing it came from.
Who runs this site
No advisory firm, no recordkeeper and no asset manager is behind this site. It is not affiliated with any company it covers. It sells nothing and currently runs no ads.
The site is maintained by one person, who signs as the 401(k) Monitor maintainer and publishes no name. That is a choice, not an accident: the maintainer would rather the data be checked against the filings than against a name. Every fact on the site identifies the exact government filing it was read from, so trusting a number here never requires trusting whoever wrote the page.
Nothing on this site is financial advice. It publishes what employers filed.
How the numbers are produced
- Match formulas, vesting and enrollment rules come from SEC Form 11-K filings, the annual report a public company must file for a 401(k) plan that offers employer stock.
- Every populated field must carry a verbatim quote from the filing; a field with no quote is published as null, not guessed.
- The numbers read from a filing are cross-checked against its inline-XBRL facts; a conflict sends the record to human review instead of the site.
- Assets, participants, plan-paid fees and recordkeepers are computed from DOL Form 5500 bulk data.
- SEC EDGAR is checked for new 11-K filings every other day; the DOL bulk data refreshes monthly.
The site currently covers 56,422 employers across 57,824 large plans from Form 5500 data. Of those employers, 219 also file an SEC Form 11-K, which is where a match formula and a vesting schedule can be read word for word. The rest are covered on what the Form 5500 reports: contributions, plan-paid fees and the recordkeeper.
Form 5500 in this detail is filed only by plans with 100 participants or more. Smaller plans file a short form that reports far less, so they are not in this data and no page here covers them.
The rules every record must satisfy, and the error rate measured on our own output, are on the methodology page.
Every company page, plan page and stats page offers its own figures as a CSV, so a number you are reading can be checked in a spreadsheet without retyping it. Quoting figures with credit and a link is welcome, and the terms are on the licence page.
Why this site exists
The match formula, the vesting schedule and the plan-paid fees of a large 401(k) plan are public information. Employers are required to file them with the SEC and the Department of Labor. In practice they are unreadable: the facts sit in audit exhibits and bulk CSV files that almost no plan participant will ever open.
This site exists to make them readable.
How to report an error
Write to corrections@401kmonitor.com with the page URL and the point of disagreement. Every report is checked against the government filing the page cites. A confirmed error is fixed in the next build of the site, usually within days, and the correction is noted on the affected page. A report the filing does not support gets a reply saying what the filing says. For anything that is not an error report, the address and what to expect are on the contact page.