Licence
Quote our figures. That is what they are here for. Take a number, a formula, a ranking or a few sentences, credit 401(k) Monitor and link to the page you took it from, and you need no permission from anyone. What is not permitted is copying the tables wholesale and republishing them as your own dataset.
What you may do without asking
Quote figures in an article, a report or a paper
A match formula, a vesting schedule, a fee figure, a plan’s rank, a median, a count. One figure or fifty, in a news story, a research paper, a policy brief, a newsletter, a court filing or a slide. Commercial publications included. Credit and a link are the whole condition.
Chart them
Build a chart or a table from figures you took from these pages and publish it, with Source: 401(k) Monitor under it. If you changed or combined the numbers, say so, so a reader does not attribute your arithmetic to us.
Quote short extracts of the writing
A sentence or a paragraph from a page or a guide, quoted and attributed, in the ordinary way one publication quotes another.
Download the page you are reading
Company pages, plan pages and the stats pages each offer their own figures as a CSV, so the numbers you are looking at can be checked in a spreadsheet without retyping them. Those files carry the same terms as this page.
Teach from it
Use pages, figures and screenshots in a class, a library guide or a course pack, with the credit line and a link.
The credit line
Paste this, or the equivalent in your house style, with a link to the page the figure came from.
401(k) Monitor, 401kmonitor.com, from SEC Form 11-K and DOL Form 5500 filings
Under a chart or a table, the short form is Source: 401(k) Monitor. In a sentence: according to 401(k) Monitor, which reads SEC Form 11-K and DOL Form 5500 filings.
What we claim, and what we do not
The filings underneath this site are United States government records. SEC Form 11-K filings and DOL Form 5500 filings are public, in the public domain, and free for anyone to obtain directly from sec.gov and dol.gov. We claim nothing over them. Nothing on this page restricts anyone from going to the source and reading it, and every page here identifies the exact filing it used, by SEC accession number or DOL ACK_ID, so the source can always be pulled and checked.
What this site owns is ordinary copyright in its own work: the compiled tables, the figures we compute rather than copy, such as administrative cost per participant and the fee percentile within a size cohort, the canonical recordkeeper names, the links drawn between the two sources, the match-change tracker, the scores, and the written pages, guides and design. Reading thousands of narrative filings into one comparable shape is the work this site consists of. Quoting from it is welcome. Copying it whole, in bulk, to stand up a competing table, is not.
Where that work is not protectable in a given jurisdiction, no permission is needed from us at all, and we do not pretend otherwise. Individual facts are not owned by anyone: a single match formula is in a public filing and always will be.
The name 401(k) Monitor and the mark are not licensed for use as your own branding, and nothing here implies we endorse what you publish. Automated collection of the whole site, and republishing the corpus as a dataset, product or feed, needs our agreement first: write to contact@401kmonitor.com and say what you want to do. Research use gets a fast yes.
No warranty
The figures are read out of filings by software, and we publish the error rate we measure on our own output instead of assuming it is zero. It is on the methodology page, with the company-by-company audit behind it. Before you publish a claim about a named employer, check the figure against the filing the page links to. That link exists for exactly this reason.
Everything here is provided as is, with no warranty of any kind. Nothing on this site is financial, tax or legal advice. Found an error? Write to corrections@401kmonitor.com with the page and the filing; confirmed errors are corrected in the next build.