Reading a plan page

The hero card identifies the plan and the sponsor. On the left: the plan name, sponsor legal name, EIN, mailing address, and contact phone. On the right: the plan year being displayed, the plan number, the NAICS industry, and a shortened filing acknowledgement ID. A link labeled View filed 5500 PDF opens the DOL's archived PDF of the exact filing in a new tab.

Below the identity row is a row of prospect-flag pills. Each pill is deterministic - it is tripped or it is not - and the color tells you how to interpret it:

• Green - no flags tripped this year. Baseline healthy.
• Amber - soft prospecting signal (recent plan termination, shrinking assets, high fees).
• Red - hard compliance or loss event (fidelity bond gap, failure to transmit contributions, corrective distributions, discovered loss).

Hover any pill to read its long description. Every flag is defined on the glossary page.

Directly under the header, a row of year chips lists every year the plan has filed. The active year is dark-filled; the others are outlined. Click any year to navigate to ?year=YYYY for that filing. If the plan only has a single year filed, this row is hidden.

Landing on a plan without ?year= in the URL shows the latest filed year. Pinning an older year is useful for historical research - all metrics, charts, and the provider table reflect the pinned year.

Five at-a-glance tiles summarize the plan. Each tile shows its value, a small sparkline of its history, and a muted context line. Values that trigger a watch-list color turn amber or red - the color is computed per-tile from either a peer-rank percentile or a hard threshold.

A year-by-year strip showing whether a plan was clean, watched, or tripped in each filed year. The header counts tripped years and watched years across the history. This is the fastest way to see whether a flagged plan has been chronically in trouble or just tripped once.

The benchmark section answers "is this plan good relative to peers?". It has three parts:

1. Peer-group metadata. Defines the cohort the plan is being compared to - same NAICS sector, same asset band, same plan-type bucket. The count of peer plans in that cohort is shown.
2. Six percentile bars. The plan's standing on six normalized metrics (participation, return, fees, match generosity, asset growth, cash drag). Higher percentile is better for all six.
3. Two trend lines. Return and fees across years, with a dashed peer-average line for context.

A semi-circle gauge at the top of the section averages the six percentiles into a single plan-rank score. Not a fiduciary judgment - a compact prospecting signal.

A grid of small-multiple charts, one per metric, each plotting up to ten filed years. Trajectory shows direction, not just magnitude - a shrinking plan with a healthy return might be bleeding rollovers, and that only shows up here.

• Assets trajectory. Total assets on the primary axis, assets per participant on a secondary axis. Divergence between the two hints at participant churn.
• Asset flow waterfall. BOY assets, plus contributions, plus investment return, less distributions, equals EOY assets. The clearest single view of how a plan year-to-date moved.
• Participants composition. Stacked active and retired-with-balance, with a dashed total line. Rising retiree count on a flat total is rollover risk.
• Participation rate. Share of eligible employees deferring. Amber when trending down.
• Contributions (two charts). Stacked employer + participant totals, and stacked per-participant equivalents. Gaps between the two reveal whether growth is coming from headcount or from generosity.
• Return bars. Plan-level return year by year. Negative years show red.
• Admin fees trajectory. Admin expenses per participant over time.
• Asset composition strip. Stacked allocation shares across years to see when a plan shifted into or out of mutual funds, stocks, real estate, or cash.

A six-slice donut showing the end-of-year allocation: cash, stocks, bonds, mutual funds, real estate, and participant loans. Next to it, a cash drag card compares the plan's cash share to the peer-group average. A plan sitting well above peer average in cash is earning less on idle balances than peers.

If the plan files Schedule I (small-plan short form) rather than Schedule H, allocation slices are not available - the donut shows a muted empty state.

A table of the plan's top service providers by direct compensation, drawn from Schedule C. Columns:

• Provider name. Legal entity as filed.
• Service type. A chip carrying the Schedule C service code (recordkeeper, trustee, auditor, investment advisor, and so on). Hover the chip for the long description.
• Compensation. Direct dollar compensation paid by the plan for the year. Indirect compensation is disclosed in the filed PDF but is not listed here.

The table shows the top ten providers sorted by compensation. An expand control reveals the full list. Plans using an insurance contract (Schedule A) instead of a direct-pay arrangement may show a mostly empty table.

A two-column block that combines the Form 5500 plan-feature codes with three spotlighted breakouts:

• Feature codes- the 2A through 3D codes, each with a short and long description. Codes answer questions like "does the plan allow participant-directed investments?" or "is it a safe-harbor plan?".
• Contributions breakdown - employer, employee, and non-cash contributions in dollars, plus per-participant equivalents.
• Expenses breakdown - admin, investment, and other expenses split out from the overall admin-expense tile.
• Fidelity bond - the ERISA Section 412 bond amount, plus a warning if the bond falls under the 10% minimum.

If the sponsor EIN has other plans filed, they appear as a card row at the bottom of the page. Common patterns: a 401(k) and a separate profit-sharing plan; a 401(k) and a defined-benefit plan; a parent and subsidiary plan structure. Click any card to open that plan's detail page.