EBSA Reports Retirement Plan Growth

The Department of Labor’s Employee Benefit Security Administration (EBSA) has released a report that shows that retirement plans are growing by all measures: number of plans, participants, assets, contributions and disbursements. 

The data is drawn from  Form 5500 Series reports for plan years ending in 2019, the most recent that are available. The information presented includes weighted counts of plans and participants for both defined benefit (DB) and defined contribution (DC) retirement plans, break-outs of plan characteristics and information on plan assets, contributions and investments. 

COVID Effects?

Filing deadlines for some plan years ending in 2019 fell during the COVID-19 public health emergency; consequently, EBSA was concerned that this could result in filing delays that might affect 2019 data. Despite this timing, however, EBSA found that while there were some minor filing delays at the start of the period affected by the pandemic, they did not materially affect either data collection or the results in the report.

Following are highlights of the data gleaned from the 2019 Form 5500 Series reports.

Number of Retirement Plans and Participants

The total number of retirement plans grew again in 2019, says EBSA, to approximately 733,700. The growth in DC plans outstripped that of DB plans, but nonetheless, even the number of DB plans grew. 

The number plan participants in 2019 grew by 2.1 million. That growth was uneven, however; the number of DC plan participants grew, but the number of DB plan participants shrank. Still, the number of active participants grew for both DC and DB plans. 

Of the 733,700 plans, 726,500 were single employer, 2,500 were multiemployer, and 4,700 were multiple-employer. 

Plan Assets

The total amount of assets held by retirement plans increased from $9.2 trillion to $10.7 trillion, which EBSA says is “the largest increase since 2008.” DC plans accounted for $7.4 trillion of that amount, while DB plans’ assets amounted to $3.3 trillion. 

There was a slight drop in the share of DB plans reported as being fully frozen in 2019, EBSA says; in 2018, 18.9% were, and in 2019, 18.7% were. Still, the amount of assets in fully frozen DB plans increased in 2019. 

Contributions

From 2018 to 2019, plan contributions increased by 6.7% to $672.8 billion. Drilling down, DC plan contributions increased by 7.2%, to $570.2 billion; DB plan contributions increased by 4.3% to $102.6 billion. 

Disbursements

Retirement plan disbursements in 2019 totaled $857 billion, $257.9 billion of which came from DB plans and $599.1 billion from DC plans. 

Retirement plans disbursed $184.1 billion more than they received in contributions during 2019. This was true for both DB plans and DC plans: DB plans disbursed $155.3 billion more than they collected in contributions, while DC plans disbursed $28.9 billion more than they received in contributions. 

Highlights for 2019 and 2018