Retirement Plan Guide
Retirement Plan Coverage by Industry
Which industries offer the best retirement benefits? Based on DOL Form 5500 2024 data.
Finance and Insurance and Professional and Technical Services lead in total retirement plan assets per participant, reflecting high-compensation industries with well-funded plans. Healthcare and Manufacturing have the most plans by count, reflecting their large employer bases across the country.
Industry matters for retirement outcomes because it determines the type, generosity, and funding level of plans available to workers. A worker in financial services is more likely to have access to a well-funded defined benefit pension or a 401(k) with generous employer matching than a worker in retail or hospitality. These differences compound over careers and are a significant source of retirement wealth inequality.
The data below covers all employer-sponsored retirement plans that filed DOL Form 5500 in the 2024 plan year. Government pension plans are excluded as they do not file Form 5500. Industry classification follows the standard industrial code reported on the filing.
How to Interpret Industry Data
Total assets per industry reflect both the number of plans and the average plan size. Finance and Insurance has enormous total assets partly because financial firms sponsor some of the largest plans in the country. Retail and Accommodation have many plans but lower average assets per participant, reflecting lower compensation levels and less generous employer contributions. When evaluating your own plan, compare it to plans in your specific industry, not to the overall average, which is skewed by the financial sector.
Participant counts reveal which industries employ the most people through companies that offer retirement benefits. High participant counts in Healthcare and Manufacturing indicate broad plan availability, even if individual plan assets vary widely. Industries with few plans but high asset totals (like Finance) tend to have fewer, larger employers.
| Industry | Plans | Participants | Total Assets |
|---|---|---|---|
| Professional & Technical Services | 20,409 | 9,777,762 | $1.3T |
| Manufacturing | 17,599 | 13,399,641 | $3.0T |
| Healthcare & Social Assistance | 16,498 | 14,518,037 | $1.2T |
| Construction | 8,704 | 4,730,289 | $581.1B |
| Finance & Insurance | 8,569 | 7,397,233 | $1.4T |
| Retail Trade | 8,153 | 12,003,435 | $534.9B |
| Other Services | 7,732 | 2,162,668 | $146.3B |
| Wholesale Trade | 5,997 | 2,809,569 | $329.8B |
| Real Estate | 4,622 | 1,533,264 | $118.1B |
| Administrative & Support Services | 4,498 | 3,626,733 | $117.4B |
| Food Services & Accommodation | 3,843 | 3,152,739 | $74.6B |
| Transportation & Warehousing | 3,295 | 4,217,936 | $552.1B |
| Educational Services | 3,219 | 2,228,269 | $406.7B |
| Arts, Entertainment & Recreation | 2,976 | 1,247,805 | $82.1B |
| Information & Media | 2,823 | 3,009,329 | $641.3B |
| Agriculture, Forestry & Fishing | 1,197 | 558,281 | $28.6B |
| Management of Enterprises | 1,133 | 1,702,296 | $412.6B |
| Mining & Oil Extraction | 794 | 495,484 | $93.9B |
| Utilities | 749 | 1,154,425 | $409.1B |
| Public Administration | 93 | 63,788 | $3.2B |
| Unclassified | 39 | 16,466 | $101M |
Worked example: coverage gap across industries
Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics data consistently shows wide industry coverage variation. Roughly 92% of finance/insurance workers are offered an employer retirement plan, compared to about 45% of accommodation/food-service workers. For a typical 25-year-old earning $42,000 in food service, the absence of an employer plan combined with no automatic enrollment means median private-sector retirement-plan participation in that industry falls to roughly 28%. Over a 40-year career, the difference between participating in a 6%-of-salary employer plan with 50% match and saving 0% in an outside account compounds to a gap of roughly $580,000 by retirement age, assuming a 6% real return. The coverage gap is not a small thing; it is the single largest determinant of cross-industry retirement security in the federal data.
Industry coverage characteristics
| Industry sector | Typical coverage rate | Typical participation rate |
|---|---|---|
| Finance & insurance | ~92% | ~85% |
| Manufacturing | ~84% | ~76% |
| Professional & technical services | ~80% | ~70% |
| Health care & social assistance | ~72% | ~62% |
| Retail trade | ~58% | ~38% |
| Accommodation & food services | ~45% | ~28% |
| Construction | ~52% | ~38% |
Industry of employment is one of the strongest predictors of retirement readiness in the United States, stronger than education, household income, or marital status.
State-mandated auto-IRA programs reshape the map
Since 2017 a growing list of states, including California, Oregon, Illinois, New York, Connecticut, Maryland, and others, have enacted laws requiring employers without a qualified retirement plan to enroll workers in a state-facilitated Roth IRA program (typically called OregonSaves, CalSavers, Illinois Secure Choice, and similar). Coverage in low-coverage industries within these states has risen by 15 to 25 percentage points within three to five years of program launch, according to multiple academic evaluations published in the National Bureau of Economic Research working paper series. The federal SECURE 2.0 Act of 2022 further expanded incentives for small-employer plan adoption, and BLS preliminary data shows coverage rates in the 50-to-99-employee tier are now rising at the fastest pace since the mid-1980s. The structural coverage gap is narrowing, but at a pace measured in decades rather than years.