The plan filters

Three rules govern the rail. Hold these and the rest reads on its own.

• Within a panel, OR. Check California and Texas; you get plans in either. Check Manufacturing and Healthcare; you get plans in either.
• Across panels, AND. Check California and Manufacturing; you get California manufacturers.
• Empty equals no filter. Nothing checked, nothing narrowed. Range filters follow the same rule: a bucket checked sets a min and max; no bucket checked clears them.

Both ranges are bucketed to industry segmentation, not tidy decimals. Each bucket has a "Detailed range" disclosure that opens a histogram slider when you need finer control.

Cerulli-standard advisor segmentation, total assets at end of year (Schedule H line 1l(b)).

ERISA-100-aware. The 100-participant line is the audit-required threshold; the other cuts match the segments advisors actually pitch into.

Three controls, all matching on the sponsor mailing address from the 5500 face.

• State. Multi-select all 50 plus DC. URL state=CA,TX.
• City. Free-text, case-insensitive substring, debounced 300 ms. URL city=Austin.
• ZIP code. Five-digit exact match. URL zip=78701.

Four sub-panels, each a checkbox list.

Grouped by family for orientation. The user picks subtypes directly; family is implicit.

• DC plans. 401(k), profit-sharing, money purchase, ESOP, SIMPLE 401(k), stock bonus, 403(b)(7), 403(b)(1) annuity, 457(b), other DC.
• Hybrid. Cash balance.
• DB plans. Defined benefit.

URL subtype=401k,profit_sharing.

Active is the default cohort; the others mark plans on the way out. Multi-select.

• Active
• Frozen (no new contributions)
• Terminating
• Wind-down

URL lifecycle=active,frozen.

Who legally sponsors the plan. Six options.

• Single-employer
• Multiemployer
• Multiple-employer
• Pooled Employer Plan
• Group of Plans
• DFE

URL structure=Single-employer.

Two options that ride alongside structure: 403(b) and For-profit. Governmental and church carve-outs are deferred (Form 5500 has no first-class field for either). URL tax_class=403(b).

Plan-design booleans that AND-compose. Every checked feature must be present on the plan-year filing.

URL features=2F,2H. Codes are uppercased server-side; case-insensitive on input.

Five booleans an advisor commonly screens for, plus the Schedule H Part 3 auditor opinion.

Schedule H Part 3 opinion type, four values: Unqualified, Qualified, Disclaimer, Adverse. Anything other than Unqualified is worth a look. URL auditor_opinion=Qualified,Adverse.

Twenty NAICS sectors at two-digit precision, search above the list, "Show all" disclosure for the long tail. Some sectors collapse multiple raw codes (Manufacturing folds 31, 32, 33; Retail folds 44, 45; Transportation folds 48, 49) and expand back when the query runs.

Sponsor industry comes from the filed NAICS code first, with PDL enrichment filling the gap when the filing left the field blank.

URL naics2=52 (Finance and Insurance), naics2=52,54 for finance plus professional services. A NAICS sub-sector field is wired on the data side and filterable via naics3=541; the rail currently exposes sectors only.

Three sub-panels: the 17 flags themselves (six DOL-deterministic, six absolute-cutoff, four peer-cohort percentile, one derived wind-down), and an "any flag tripped" toggle. All flags are stored as flag_* columns on the plan-year row and sourced to the line.

Reported by the sponsor on the filing. If the box is checked here, the DOL has it on file. Trustworthy enough to screen prospects on directly.

Each metric has size- and industry-independent meaning, so a single named cutoff is enough to make a result auditable from the column alone.

Each metric depends on plan size and industry, so the ranking sits inside a peer cohort (plan-year x NAICS sector x participant bucket x plan type). Bottom-quintile trips the flag.

A four-signal OR detecting closed-to-enrollment or frozen plans. Surfaces plans where the participation-rate metric would mislead, and lets the search and benchmark cohorts exclude them.

URL flags=flag_fidelity_bond,flag_recently_terminated. Check the "Any prospect flag tripped" box to set flag_any=1; matches when at least one of the 17 is on.

Three ranges, every cutoff anchored to an advisor-meaningful line.

The 1.00% line is the conventional high-fee call-out for fee-competitive advisors.

Signed percent change in total assets vs the prior filing.

Active divided by eligible. Below 70% is the auto-flag threshold for flag_participation_rate.

Type-ahead any recordkeeper, advisor, TPA, auditor, or legal-services provider that has appeared on a Schedule C. The search returns canonical providers with a count of plans they served; selecting one filters the results to plans where that provider is named on Schedule C.

Provider name canonicalization runs in the warehouse - we collapse spelling variants and parent/subsidiary tags onto a single canonical id, so "Empower Retirement, Inc." and "Empower" resolve to the same row. Multi-select ANDs together: a plan must show all selected providers on its Schedule C.

Browse the full provider directory at /provider; carriers and brokers have their own directories at /welfare/carrier and /welfare/broker.

A few rules keep saved searches predictable.

• Snake case. All param names are lower snake case, no camel.
• Range suffixes. Numeric ranges use _min and _max. Drop one to open-end the range on that side.
• Comma-separated multi-select. state=CA,TX,NY. Order is preserved; duplicates dropped.
• Booleans. A truthy value enables (safe_harbor=1); the param's absence disables. 0 and empty string are dropped.
• Defaults dropped. sort=total_assets_eoy and dir=desc are the defaults and stay out of the URL.
• Sort and pagination. sort, dir, limit, offset. Limit defaults to 25.

A worked example:

/retirement?state=NH,VT,ME
  &assets_min=10000000&assets_max=50000000
  &naics2=52&features=2F,2H
  &flags=flag_fidelity_bond

Reads as: small-to-mid plans in northern New England finance, with ERISA 404(c) and participant-directed investments, where the fidelity bond flag tripped.

PlanOptica covers every retirement plan-year filing the DOL publishes from 2015 through 2026 - Form 5500 plus Schedules H, I, SB, MB, G, R, and C. The filters on this page only narrow retirement results.

Welfare and group-health plans live at /welfare with their own filter rail (funding type, carriers, brokers, premium percentiles, 12 welfare prospect flags). See Reading a welfare plan page for the welfare side.