Reading a retirement plan page

The unified header identifies the plan and the sponsor. Sponsor legal name, DBA where filed, EIN, mailing address with line-2, contact phone, plan number, plan year, NAICS industry, and a shortened filing ACK ID. A link labeled View filed 5500 PDFopens the DOL's archived PDF for the exact filing in a new tab.

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

• Green. No flags tripped this year. Baseline healthy.
• Amber. Soft prospecting signal (high cash, low participation, retiree concentration, fee outlier).
• Red. Hard compliance or loss event (fidelity bond gap, failed contributions, corrective distributions, discovered loss, recently terminated).

Hover any pill for its long description. The full flag taxonomy lives on the glossary page.

Two preview panels sit directly below the header, each opening a drawer with the full list.

• Filing contacts. The sponsor signer, admin signer, plan administrator, auditor (engagement partner where signed), defined-benefit actuary, Schedule C named providers, and any welfare brokers and carriers under the same EIN. Names, titles, phone, and email pulled from the 5500 face and schedules.
• Documents.Every Form 5500 and Schedule that the sponsor EIN has filed - across years and across plans - plus any Top Hat employer statements. Each row deep-links to the DOL's archived PDF.

Sponsor-level contacts are scoped to the EIN, so opening the drawer on a 401(k) page also surfaces the welfare brokers under the same employer. Documents on the plan page filter to this single plan; sponsor pages and /companies/[ein] show the EIN-wide set.

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, providers, actuary, and Top Hat data 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 trip a watch-list color turn amber or red - the color is computed per-tile from either a peer-rank percentile or a hard threshold.

The benchmark section answers "is this plan good relative to its peers?" in three parts.

1. Peer-cohort metadata. Defines the cohort: same NAICS sector, same asset band, same plan-type bucket. The peer count is shown so you know how thin or wide the slice is.
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 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 moved this year.
• 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. Stacked employer plus 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 table of the plan's service providers, drawn from Schedule C, ranked by direct compensation. Columns:

• Provider name.Linked to the provider's analytics page on /provider when the name resolves to a canonical entity.
• Service type. A chip carrying the Schedule C service code (recordkeeper, trustee, auditor, investment advisor, legal, and so on). Hover the chip for the long description.
• Address. Provider mailing address from the filing.
• Compensation. Direct dollar compensation paid by the plan for the year. Indirect compensation appears in the filed PDF; surface those via the documents drawer.

The top providers expand on demand. Plans using an insurance contract (Schedule A) instead of a direct-pay arrangement may show a sparse table.

Renders only on plans that file Schedule SB or Schedule MB. Surfaces the actuary's name and firm, the plan's funded status, the funding target and assets of record, the plan's effective interest rate, and the actuary's opinion line. For multiemployer plans (Schedule MB), zone status and rehabilitation indicators sit alongside.

The schedule and line for every figure is linked. Useful for diligence on frozen or terminating DB plans, and for spotting plans approaching a critical-and-declining zone classification.

Schedule G Part III lists party-in-interest transactions during the year. Surfaces the counterparty, the nature of the transaction, and the dollar amount. Self-dealing, related-party loans, and unusual asset transfers all sit here when reported.

Most plans have an empty Schedule G; when it's populated, it's a starting point for fiduciary review and prohibited-transaction analysis.

Renders only when the sponsor EIN has filed a Top Hat employer statement under DOL section 2520.104-23 - unfunded deferred-compensation plans for a select group of management or highly compensated employees. The section shows when the statement was filed, the number of plans the EIN reported, and the contact line.

Contact details are tier-gated: signed-out viewers see the redacted line, signed-in viewers see the email address as filed.

A two-column block that combines the Form 5500 plan-feature codes with two 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?" and "is it a safe-harbor design?".
• Contributions breakdown. Employer, employee, and non-cash contributions in dollars, plus per-participant equivalents.
• Fidelity bond. The ERISA Section 412 bond amount, plus a warning if the bond falls under the 10% minimum.

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

Each tripped year expands into the specific flags that tripped, with the exact metric value and the cutoff. A cured-next-year story stays visible: flags reflect the filing as filed, not subsequent corrective action.

Two side-by-side panels.

• Expense breakdown. Admin, investment, and other expenses split out from the overall admin-expense tile. Per-participant equivalents sit alongside the dollar figures.
• Audit opinion.Schedule H Part 3 opinion type: Unqualified, Qualified, Disclaimer, or Adverse. Includes the auditor's name and firm, and a link to the audit report PDF where filed. Anything other than Unqualified is worth a closer look.

A banner at the top (and a card row at the bottom) links to the cross-form sponsor view at /companies/[ein]. 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; a retirement plan and an employer welfare plan under the same EIN.

/companies is the canonical sponsor surface: portfolio analytics, EIN-wide contact list, every filed document, and a deep link into each plan profile.