Every workplace plan files its costs with the government once a year, and almost nobody reads them. We read 92,933 of those filings. Two plans holding the same amount of money can pay fees twenty-six times apart — and the further down the size scale you go, the less the price seems to relate to anything.
52,590 plans, searchable by employer name. Your own plan is in here if your employer has more than about a hundred people in it.
Bigger plans pay less. That much is expected — scale buys leverage. The odd part is the spread. Among plans holding roughly the same money, the dearest tenth pay many times what the cheapest tenth pay for the same job.
A plan with $5m in it might pay 3 basis points, or it might pay 75. Both are normal.
At the top of the scale that stops being true. Plans above a billion dollars cluster tightly, because at that size somebody is negotiating and has the leverage to make it stick.
The gap narrows steadily as plans grow: from roughly twenty-six times at the small end to seven times at the large end.
Counts cover plans that disclose a real fee. Some report almost nothing, which is a reporting artefact rather than generosity — see the method notes.
The source is public, free, and takes about two minutes. If a number on this page is wrong, this is how you find out.
All of it comes from public filings, and all of it can be checked. Six things are worth knowing before you lean on a number here.
Filings received by the Department of Labor up to 24 August 2026, covering plan years ending through December 2025. Plans get seven months after their year ends to file, plus a two-and-a-half month extension, and the larger plans that have to file the fee schedule take that extension. So a third of all 2025 filings are in, but only about an eighth of the ones carrying a fee: this data is mostly plan year 2024 until 15 October 2026. Each result shows the year it came from.
401(k) plans only: pension benefit code 2G, single employer, with no welfare benefits on the same filing. Form 5500 also covers health, dental and vision plans, and leaving those in puts pharmacy vendors on a retirement fee table.
Recordkeepers only, identified by Schedule C service code 15, counting direct and indirect compensation together. Schedule C lists every vendor paid $5,000 or more, so an unfiltered comparison ranks law firms as expensive: plans with problems hire lawyers.
This measures disclosed compensation. A high number is real. A low one might mean the fee is wrapped inside an insurance or annuity contract, where it never reaches Schedule C at all. Don't read a low figure as good news.
Fund expense ratios come out of your returns before you ever see them, so they never appear on these filings. For most savers they are the bigger number. Everything here sits on top of them.
Fees vary for defensible reasons: service scope, plan complexity, participant support, payroll integration. A figure here is a reason to ask a question, not a conclusion about anyone's conduct.