Northwestern University Retirement Plan

Other · DOL Form 5500 · 2023

What the Filing Says About Northwestern University Voluntary Savings Plan

Northwestern University Voluntary Savings Plan is an Other retirement plan sponsored by Northwestern University, headquartered in Illinois. According to the U.S. Department of Labor's 2023 Form 5500 filing, the plan reports $1.1B in total end-of-year assets and covers 12,335 participants across the Educational Services industry. The sponsor's EIN on file with the U.S. Department of Labor is 362167817, and the plan has been effective since 1974-09-01. Its filing status is currently FILING RECEIVED.

Year over year, total assets grew sharply from $950M at the beginning of 2023 to $1.1B at year-end - up 15.5%. Net assets (after liabilities) closed the year at $1.1B, with reported net income of $147M 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 University has on file with PlainRetire (2022-2024), sponsor-wide plan assets have moved from $4.5B to $5.7B, a gain of 26.8%, while reported participants moved from 25,039 to 21,547 (-13.9%). The strongest year on file by total sponsor assets was 2024 at $5.7B; the softest was 2022 at $4.5B. Year-by-year, sponsor-wide filings show: 2022 - $4.5B in assets across 3 plans covering 25,039 participants; 2023 - $5.1B in assets across 3 plans covering 21,775 participants; 2024 - $5.7B in assets across 2 plans covering 21,547 participants.

By assets, Northwestern University Voluntary Savings Plan outranks 99% of the 126,618 plans that filed a Form 5500 for the 2023 plan year, and holds roughly 11x 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 2023 Form 5500 with a reported end-of-year asset figure (126,618 plans), rank Northwestern University Voluntary 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.