A field guide to Form 5500 intelligence.
PlanOptica makes the US Department of Labor's retirement-plan filings searchable, comparable, and readable. Use these pages to learn how to find a plan, read a plan detail page, and decode the prospect flags and benchmark percentiles.
Three pages that cover the whole app.
Pick the one that matches what you came to do. Each is a single-scroll page, written for someone new to Form 5500 data.
Searching plans
Search box, preset chips, sort options, and how a URL becomes a saved search.
Reading a plan page
Every section on a plan detail page: summary tiles, peer benchmarks, 10-year trajectory, provider tables, flag timeline.
Plan filters
Every /plans filter in focus: bucket cutoffs, URL grammar, recipes worth keeping. The field guide for prospect lists.
What is in this dataset?
The Form 5500 is the annual financial and demographic report that every ERISA retirement plan files with the Department of Labor. It is public domain and published through EFAST2 each year.
PlanOptica ingests the raw bulk filings, shapes them through a warehouse, and denormalises them into a single searchable table: 552,987 plan-year rows covering 2021 through 2025, including 401(k), 403(b), defined-benefit, profit-sharing, and ESOP plans. The dataset refreshes monthly.
Every plan year in the dataset is a single filing snapshot. When you land on a plan detail page you are reading the latest filed year by default; the year selector at the top pins any prior year in the plan's history.
Numbers on plan pages come directly from the filed Form 5500 (assets, participants, contributions, expenses) and its schedules: H for large plans, I for small plans, A for insurance contracts, C for service-provider compensation.
Who is this for?
Conventions used across the app
- Color tone is meaningful. Amber means a soft watch-list signal; red means a hard compliance or loss event; green means healthy or best-in-peer.
- Percentiles are 0 to 100, higher is better. A 90th-percentile participation rate means 90% of peers participate less than this plan does.
- URLs are the state. Every filter and every pinned plan year lives in the URL; share a link to share a result set.
- Nulls are shown, not hidden. A dash or a dimmed tile means the underlying field was blank on the filing - often Schedule H data on a small plan that filed Schedule I only.