401(k) Monitor

Are your 401(k) fees high?

Every large 401(k) plan reports what it paid in administrative expenses on a government form. We computed the going rate from 54,783 of those filings, so you can put your own plan’s number in context. Facts and mechanics only, not advice.

$157

Median plan-paid administrative cost per participant, per year, in small plans (100–499 people), form year 2024.

In plans with 5,000+ people the median is $55. Whether a number is high depends almost entirely on plan size.

What this fee is, and what it isn't

The number above is the plan-paid administrative fee: recordkeeping, trustee, audit and similar services, paid out of plan assets and reported on Schedule H of the plan’s Form 5500. Divide it by the number of participants and you get a cost per head you can compare across plans.

It is not the whole cost of your 401(k). Fund expense ratios (the percentage skimmed inside each mutual fund you hold) are a separate, usually larger, layer that never appears on Schedule H. Neither do bills the employer pays out of its own pocket. So every figure on this page is a floor, not the all-in cost.

What plans actually pay

Small plans pay the most per person, because fixed costs are split among fewer people. The medians by plan size, from form year 2024 filings:

Median plan-paid administrative cost per participant per year, among 54,783 large 401(k) plans reporting usable fee data, form year 2024. Full decile table on the stats page.
100–499 participants$157
500–999 participants$115
1,000–4,999 participants$85
5,000+ participants$55

How to read a fee percentile

Our plan pages rank each plan against plans of the same size: a fee percentile of 80 means the plan paid more per participant than 80% of its size peers; 0 is cheapest. The comparison only works within a cohort. Intel’s 401(k) plan paid about $3 per participant, the 2nd percentile among 5,000+-person plans, while JPMorgan Chase’s plan paid about $73, the 66th percentile of the same cohort. Yet that same $73 would sit comfortably below the median for a 300-person plan. Size first, then the number.

Why $0 doesn't mean free

Some filings report $0 of plan-paid administrative expense. That almost never means the plan costs nothing to run. It means the employer pays the vendors directly, or the costs are collected invisibly through the funds’ expense ratios. For that reason our medians are computed only among plans reporting an amount above zero, and our pages label a missing figure as “not reported in the filing”, never as free.

Check your own plan

You have two official documents: the annual fee disclosure your plan must send you (it lists both admin fees and fund expense ratios), and the plan’s Form 5500, which anyone can look up. If your employer is one of the Costco- or Wells Fargo-sized companies in our data, its plan page already shows the fee, the percentile, and the source filing.