Retirement Plan Guides
Data-driven guides to understanding retirement plans, Form 5500 filings, and employer benefit programs.
How to Read a Form 5500
What the DOL's annual retirement plan filing tells you about your employer's plan health.
401(k) vs. Defined Benefit Pension
Key differences between the two main types of employer-sponsored retirement plans.
The Largest 401(k) Plans in America
Which companies have the biggest retirement plans and what they reveal about workplace benefits.
Retirement Plan Coverage by Industry
Which industries offer the best retirement benefits to employees.
What Is an ESOP?
How Employee Stock Ownership Plans work and how to find ESOP companies using Form 5500 data.
Understanding Retirement Plan Fees
How fees compound over decades and how to use Form 5500 data to evaluate your plan costs.
Retirement Plan Coverage by State
Which states lead in plan availability and what drives geographic variation.
Methodology, How These Guides Are Written
Every PlainRetire guide is written directly against the U.S. Department of Labor's Form 5500 public disclosure dataset, using the most recent plan year with complete asset-reporting coverage (see each guide's own byline for its exact plan year). When a guide cites a number - "Walmart's 401(k) holds $X billion", "15,000 plans in Texas", "the average plan fee is Y%" - that number is computed from the same normalized tables that power the data pages on this site (plans, plan_assets, states, industries). We do not rely on third-party summaries or press releases for headline figures.
Guides are structured to explain what the underlying Form 5500 fields actually measure, how they are computed by the plan sponsor, and what they do not measure - common pitfalls in interpretation, year-over-year comparability, and the difference between filed data and participant outcomes. Where a guide uses an example plan, the detail page for that plan is linked so readers can verify the numbers against the raw filing.
Scope: U.S. employer-sponsored retirement plans that file Form 5500-401(k), defined benefit pensions, ESOPs, profit-sharing, money-purchase, and IRA-based plans. Out of scope: individual retirement accounts without an employer filing, non-qualified deferred compensation, Social Security, and state-run retirement systems (which file different disclosures).
Primary dataset: U.S. Department of Labor, EBSA Form 5500 public disclosure dataset.
Filing retrieval: DOL EFAST2 - efast.dol.gov.