Northwestern Energy 401(k) Retirement Savings Plan

401(k) · DOL Form 5500 · 2022

What the Filing Says About Northwestern Energy 401(k) Retirement Savings Plan

Northwestern Energy 401(k) Retirement Savings Plan is a 401(k) retirement plan sponsored by Northwestern Corporation, headquartered in Montana. According to the U.S. Department of Labor's 2022 Form 5500 filing, the plan reports $406M in total end-of-year assets and covers 1,494 participants across the Utilities industry. The sponsor's EIN on file with the U.S. Department of Labor is 460172280, and the plan has been effective since 1984-01-01. Its filing status is currently FILING RECEIVED.

Year over year, total assets declined sharply from $493M at the beginning of 2022 to $406M at year-end - down 17.8%. Net assets (after liabilities) closed the year at $405M, with reported net income of -$88M driven by investment returns, contributions received, and benefit payments during the period. These figures reflect what the plan administrator certified on Schedule H or Schedule I of the Form 5500 annual return and can be compared against 2 prior plan-year filings from the same sponsor shown below.

Across the 3 plan years Northwestern Corporation has on file with PlainRetire (2022-2024), sponsor-wide plan assets have moved from $855M to $911M, a gain of 6.6%, while reported participants moved from 2,084 to 2,037 (-2.3%). The strongest year on file by total sponsor assets was 2024 at $911M; the softest was 2022 at $855M. Year-by-year, sponsor-wide filings show: 2022 - $855M in assets across 3 plans covering 2,084 participants; 2023 - $869M in assets across 3 plans covering 2,047 participants; 2024 - $911M in assets across 3 plans covering 2,037 participants.

By assets, Northwestern Energy 401(k) Retirement Savings Plan outranks 97% of the 139,258 plans that filed a Form 5500 for the 2022 plan year, and holds roughly 4.1x the national average plan size of $100M and 730 average participants.

Asset totals and participant counts reflect a single plan year snapshot and can change materially with market conditions, plan mergers, or workforce changes. Fields such as "net income" include both realized investment performance and contribution/distribution flows, a single-year figure does not by itself indicate plan health or participant outcomes. This page summarizes public DOL disclosures for research and educational purposes only and is not retirement, tax, legal, or financial advice. Before making decisions about your own retirement benefits or evaluating an employer's plan, verify the underlying filing directly via the DOL EFAST2 system and consult a qualified professional.

How the percentile is calculated: we count every plan that filed a 2022 Form 5500 with a reported end-of-year asset figure (139,258 plans), rank Northwestern Energy 401(k) Retirement Savings Plan against all of them by total assets, and report the share of those plans it outranks. A plan reporting no asset figure for the year is excluded from the ranking rather than assumed to be zero.