Gates Foundation Profit Sharing Plan

Profit Sharing · DOL Form 5500 · 2024

What the Filing Says About Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Sharing Retirement Plan

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Sharing Retirement Plan is a Profit Sharing retirement plan sponsored by Gates Foundation, headquartered in Washington. According to the U.S. Department of Labor's 2024 Form 5500 filing, the plan reports $680M in total end-of-year assets and covers 1,926 participants across the Other Services industry. The sponsor's EIN on file with the U.S. Department of Labor is 562618866, and the plan has been effective since 1997-06-01. Its filing status is currently FILING RECEIVED.

Year over year, total assets grew sharply from $579M at the beginning of 2024 to $680M at year-end - up 17.4%. Net assets (after liabilities) closed the year at $680M, with reported net income of $101M 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 Gates Foundation has on file with PlainRetire (2022-2024), sponsor-wide plan assets have moved from $687M to $1.0B, a gain of 47.9%, while reported participants moved from 3,193 to 3,852 (+20.6%). The strongest year on file by total sponsor assets was 2024 at $1.0B; the softest was 2022 at $687M. Year-by-year, sponsor-wide filings show: 2022 - $687M in assets across 2 plans covering 3,193 participants; 2023 - $857M in assets across 2 plans covering 3,470 participants; 2024 - $1.0B in assets across 2 plans covering 3,852 participants.

By assets, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Sharing Retirement Plan outranks 98% of the 116,472 plans that filed a Form 5500 for the 2024 plan year, and holds roughly 6.8x 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 2024 Form 5500 with a reported end-of-year asset figure (116,472 plans), rank Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Sharing Retirement 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.